Baby Boomers - This deeply resonates with boomers...

You are severely underestimating the amount of debt accrued and the bullshit amount of VaRiEd SkIlLz required to get a base line minimum wage job nowadays.

Aight dumbo you get that we "the people" need money to live right? We can't get money without jobs and we can't get jobs unless we go to college (and then some other stuff), now I don't know if you know this but the basic cost of living has been going up at an alarming rate to the point where some people work 3 or 4 jobs and are still living from paycheck to paycheck.
You talk about supply and demand as if we were the ones in control of it we aren't, the corporations are, they set the standards of what's needed to get a job using, your terms: jobs are the product and qualifications are the currency we use to get that product, but see we NEED jobs to survive so the demand for them will never go down, thing is there's barely any supply, so when demand is astronomical and supply is near non existent the price raises accordingly because you can't get the product anywhere else.
Schools just take advantage of all this and why wouldn't they? We depend on them and we'll depend on them until the cycle is broken.