For US college education to collapse, a bunch of other things are going to have to collapse, too. The crisis in US college education is a crisis of elite overp

For US college education to collapse, a bunch of other things are going to have to collapse, too. The crisis in US college education is a crisis of elite overproduction, along with a concurrent increase in economic inequality and the disappearance of the middle class. A college education is a requirement to enter or stay in the professional-managerial class (PMC), and avoid the increasing immiseration of the working class in the US. That's why people are willing to spend so much money on it. The problem is that the PMC is shrinking as their jobs are gradually eliminated and replaced with proletarianized ones: doctors with nurse practitioners and PAs, tenured professors with adjuncts. So the higher education system is overproducing PMC candidates who will either never work in their field, or will work in its non-PMC roles, and struggle to pay off the debt on a gamble that didn't work out. This, of course, makes PMC parents desperate to get their children into elite colleges, to make them competitive for the declining slots. This is, of course, over time, a losing strategy, but it's one that is short-sightedly rational. I don't think we're actually going to see a decline in credentialism, as @sama suggests is going on. I expect it to intensify, if anything. For the education pyramid scheme to collapse, there will have to be a fundamental reorientation of the economy and power structures in the US, which is to say, a collapse thereof.