There's this problem with education costs in the US.
1) Primary education (I include highschool here, even though the term has specific meaning for gradeschool in the US) has had severe quality issues because they want to genericize curriculum instead of tailor it for each classroom, to meet certain standardized metrics which has resulted in school systems tailoring education to meet the letter but not the intent of those standard metrics. The result is very poor education in general. To add insult to this, keeping underperforming children back a year is a big black mark against the school, and so schools will pull every dirty trick imaginable to prevent it happening. The result is the defacto pushing along of students that really really really do need extra effort and teaching time through the system. The consequence of this leads to...
2) Employers have noticed. They have resorted to making "college degree" the new standard for "Yes, I can read, do mathematics, and follow basic instructions", and NO-- THEY WONT COMPROMISE ON IT.
3) Since the baseline for "It's a job that isn't flipping burgers" is now "at least an associate's degree" and "A job that actually pays something I can live on" is now "At least a bachelor's degree", the college education system is just overloaded with students to the point where tuition and fees balloon into the stratosphere.
4) The legislature does nothing about this, because:
A) That would require admitting that their well-meaning policies at the federal level have resulted in a situation that is absolute shit.
B) There is blowback from the voter-base about increasing spending to pay for remedial education, or to provide incentives for better quality education and materials
C) A certain political party is just in fucking love with ideas that create perverse incentives in the educational system that cause this kind of mess, and wont relent on the inclusion of these policies
D) "How DARE you try to dictate to businesses!" should you try a top-down smackdown on demanding college degrees for menial labor
E) Generally, trying to accomplish anything is like herding cattle
Meanwhile, people gotta make enough money to eat, business owners dont want to hire the drooling, slack-jawed idiot that knows how to throw a ball real good, but cant tie his shoelaces, and HR has to try to find some way to weed those people out of the hiring process without running foul of equal opportunity labor law.
Basically, the issue starts with primary education, and specifically, how the fed has mangled it with their bullshit implementation of funding allocation, penalization practices for underperforming schools, and pedantic metricification of "success!"
Even if the policies that CAUSED the problem are addressed, it will be 15 to 20 years before the system resets itself. In that time, how do you ensure that employers do not demand degrees for bullshit reasons, so that people can actually, you know-- NOT STARVE TO DEATH-- should they decide not to seek higher education?