For certain careers, you are certainly right. A career in hard sciences and engineering does require a university education. *

However, the people who are capable of that are a minority, and only those should go there. Instead, lots of people are now going to college for basically no reason.

If you'll allow for some cynicism: I'm pretty sure the core issue is that corporations cannot discriminate based on race, but college education is a good proxy for the personality traits that corporations are looking for when they discriminate. This is related to how a vanishing proportion of blacks complete college. So a college requirement substitutes for what was previously "don't be black".

(* Though software engineering, not so much. It's completely possible to learn programming entirely on your own. If people do that, they don't get much more from college, and if they won't, they're not a good fit for the job.)

For certain careers, you are certainly right. A career in hard sciences and engineering does require a university education. *

However, the people who are capable of that are a minority, and only those should go there. Instead, lots of people are now going to college for basically no reason.

If you'll allow for some cynicism: I'm pretty sure the core issue is that corporations cannot discriminate based on race, but college education is a good proxy for the personality traits that corporations are looking for when they discriminate based on race. It also just happens that a vanishing proportion of blacks complete college. So a college requirement substitutes for what was previously simply "don't be black".

(* Though software engineering, not so much. It's completely possible to learn programming entirely on your own. If people do that, they don't get much more from college, and if they won't, they're not a good fit for the job.)