And it just reeks of Boomer memes
This is just eye-roll worthy and it's followed by a bunch of straw-man stuff. Nobody except yourself mentioned "degrees in underwater basket weaving". Pulling up made-up stuff like that is borderline ad hominem, poisoning the well.
The whole discussion was whether it's a waste that we're not creating jobs for people with master's degrees. That's stuff like MBAs and masters of science. Point is: if someones qualification isn't something other people need then how exactly do we justifying forcing other people to spend money on it? That will generally only lead to a worse allocation of resources than we have now, it creates a make-work / waste-work culture. It's like saying that because you made a shitty movie or shitty game we should force people to watch it / play it because otherwise the effort to create it would be wasted. No, the sensible thing is that you cut your losses and find something else to do.
We can go full communist about it, and pre-allocate education, but that does the same thing I said - you limit intake to only the places required for future job requirements. The trade-off would be that you take away student choice to a large degree. Yes, the state will fund you to study things, but only the exact things that are required by the planned economy. you'd no longer have the master's degree guy flipping burgers, but the reality would probably be that we was a burger-flipper from day one and didn't get the degree.
Accuses of ad hominem and straw man. Proceeds to respond to a bunch of stuff I didn't say.
*shrug*
The paragraph about master's degrees is because that's why I was actually talking about. It's re-railing what I was talking about and not letting you steer it into me defending something I wasn't even talking about, didn't even allude to. It's not straw manning. If you're not discussing that topic, then we literally have nothing to discuss, because that's the whole topic I was discussing and I'm not going to be railroaded into supporting some random other position just because it's your pet topic.
And the last paragraph is pointing out the alternative, and basically challenging you to come up with something better. Got anything?
I mean, if you don't want people's degrees wasted by not being utilized then the natural way to do that is to have a planned economy. The thing is, "masters degree guy ends up waiting tables" issue even happens in places like Sweden and Norway, the only place that wouldn't happen is if the government micro-manages what you study and what job you get afterwards. One possible argument is that "degrees should be free", which would be nice
while you're getting the degree but in the long run would incentivize study regardless of whether the jobs are there after you graduate. In that case, you'd get a degree which is nice, but you'd have spent 3-4 years training for something that isn't there, so there's still the major expense of
time that you could have been doing something else or saving up money.