It is broken. For every coveted job there are thousands of applicants. Employers will accept any signal that reliably predicts a modicum of intelligence, conscientiousness, and agreeability. University degrees cover all three.

But that's just the job market. The other elephants in the room are inflation and the housing market. People who don't have top-notch jobs (that require degrees) can't afford to buy a house. They can hardly afford rent. Cities don't want to build more housing because that will undermine the equity growth of homeowners.

We are a society of ladder-pullers.

My tuition was $35k a year 25 years ago. Just checked, and now it is $60k a year. Before room and board.

Broken? Saddling individuals with a quarter million in debt when they are just starting life is absolutely broken. That they must indenture to be a modern professional (and buy hope for at least a middle class landing) is broken.

The notion that everything must return a (generally, near-term) accounting profit is on its face stupid.

Sure, the system is broken but what's the alternative? Employers have a surplus of applicants for entry-level technical positions. They need to filter the applicant pool down to those with some level of competence and discipline. Possession of a college degree is a reasonably accurate proxy for those attributes: lots of false negatives but good enough from the employer's perspective.

Ideally maybe employers ought to rely on more targeted selection mechanisms. But this would be extremely expensive (and potentially legally risky due to equal opportunity laws) so most don't bother.

> I would argue that if it costs $60,000, both your education system and the recruitment in those companies that require this degree are broken.

Meh, academic degrees don't come for free, someone has to pay for universities, staff and other expenses. In the US it's everyone for themselves by student loans that can't be discharged in bankruptcies, in Europe it's the tax payers.

The problem is, the ones profiting from the gatekeeping (aka employers) aren't the ones paying for it in either system. If employers had to pay, say, 10.000$ for each job listing that requires an academic degree without an actual valid reason, guess how fast that incentive would lead to employers not requiring academic degrees for paper-pusher bullshit jobs.