Recently I've seen a ton of videos and blogs bitching about soaring college tuition and the trillion dollar student debt in the US. They did do their job analyze the situation to certain breadth and depth but really most of them stopped at identifying cause and effect to this whole mess and some basic fix-shit-up recommendations. But none had actually done the job quite like Hasan Minhaj did in one of his Patriot Act episode.

Ivy League started to chase after rich kids, college presidents and endowment managers's salaries are paid in Ferraris, adjunct professors and TAs are treated like shit, low-income students are forced to work full time jobs to survive. Most of the tuition fees did not went back to education but went straight into an ever growing and vastly untapped "endowment". Putting his humor and unapologetic jokes aside, he was right about pretty much anything. Colleges are LLCs and public companies and education itself has become some sort of higher-end industry. Colleges flaunt their prestige on social media, compete with each other in the rankings for building brand awareness, rich students are treated like cruise ship passengers while their tuition fees are injected straight into hedge funds instead of into their education.
For long I had expected that colleges are somewhat greedy just like any other generic mega corporations. But now, it seems to me that they have gone a bit too far.

In a world where people depend on marginal profits and tax breaks to survive and thrive, there's nothing wrong with college institutions asking for tuition fees.

But the problem with them is their capital and resources are outrageously misallocated and mismanaged. Important priorities such as treating professors well and supporting poor/disabled/needy students are overshadowed by unsought amenities and lavish student experiences, as well as greedy endowment managers. It is almost a no-brainer that students don't get what they pay for.

We get much less value from the service for more price.

Imagine getting a drivers license for $3000 from a private institution. As everyone is expected to hold a license in order to drive and to make life for them easier, it does not make business sense if they jack up the price and expect everyone to buy into this crap. You would feel like being scammed and that school deserved to be sued to the ground. Ironically many colleges still use this unworldly pricing strategy and they miraculously got away with it.
The quality of instruction in college is somewhat stagnant. Teaching methods never went beyond mind-numbing lecture slide readings and group discussions. It is even possible to pass the entire course without reviewing school materials at all. Also you can learn way more things from Udemy, Masterclass, and the good'ol apprenticeships all combined with a tiny fraction of the current tuition level. One study even claimed that 34 hours on Duolingo equals 1 whole semester of language courses.
Companies and industries around the world has increasingly been finicky about hiring fresh undergrads. It is out of question that job seekers are expected to have real life experiences and a degree is simply not enough. As we can see, in tech industry sheer experience may substitute degrees completely regardless of the job.

Normally if a consumer/customer gets a defective product or the service is found to be not suitable and adequate they are perfectly eligible to sue the provider for damages

He/she would be able to sue the provider to recover damages under consumer protection laws. But students have never got the same kind of protection consumers have. One cannot simply take legal action against the school because he/she finds out that they are scamming him/her. Not only it is unlikely that he/she will get some of his/her money back, the school may as well expel them in retaliation. The opportunity cost of not going to college makes students more reluctant to drop out. Because of how modern society works, we are definitely going to be punished harshly for saying no to college. It sounds a lot like a carrot and stick analogy but in this case the stick is replaced with a freaking steel mace. Besides losing time, energy and money to your unfinished undergrad program, you also risk losing out the chance to improve your quality of life and to move up in the world.

What happened to college and why is it such a nightmare for us millennials ?

Back in the old days, particularly in the 60s in the US, attending college is something people with great aspirations would do. If people wanted to work for NASA as an aerospace engineer to become a doctor, then college would be the golden gate to their desired career path. A degree was necessary for those who want to work for science and humanity.Tuition fee was kept low and affordable thanks to government subsidization and incentives for military research. College was somehow insulated from corporatism as faculty outnumber administrator staff and had much bigger clout over the school. Now you are forgiven if you think I'm sugarcoating the past. Colleges back then did have major problems of their own, like racial segregation and overt sexism. However that is not what I'm focusing here.
Overtime more and more people joined the wagon as the value of getting a degree remained significant. Colleges/unis started growing up in numbers to fill the supply gap and competition over new students was getting intense. Thus the education industry was born.
From there that society started developing an unhealthy relationship with tertiary education. Employers thought college students should at least offer something better than those uneducated people. People from all walks of life spun up narratives about the necessity of a college degree in today's modern world. Our society's unquestioning addiction to higher education led to a brand new phenomenon known as degree inflation. The undue influence of that piece of thick decorated paper over our livelihood enabled colleges to assert huge control over our future and autonomy, thus incentivizing them to maximize their ROI by any means, even if it means killing our future and cripple our economy.

Tertiary education is a relatively an under-regulated industry

College indeed sucks. But I'm not saying that the college system itself is broken and should be abolished. In fact college is very much relevant to our knowledge-dependent society where soft skills and critical thinking are king traits. College are also among the few places that provide us a suitable environment to socialize, work and study simultaneously.
I'm saying college needs serious reforms if not regulation. Here are some of my suggestions for change sorted by feasibility.

So how can we turn things around ?

Don't overvalue college degrees.

Perhaps the most difficult thing to do but one of the effective measures if done by everyone. The tuition problem can be simply explained with a supply and demand curve. Our society's overvaluation of that stuff causes huge demand for it. The overwhelming demand over the limited supply of that piece of scented paper naturally raises tuition fee. The most intuitive solution that I can think of would be opening more colleges. But opening a college is a capital intensive and also idea intensive feat. Cash aside, you also need to spend considerable amount of time and energy in developing an education philosophy, making a curriculum, convincing people to invest or donate in your school, and worst of all, getting accreditation and government approval. Starting a college business is just unrealistic as telling Londoners to stop complaning about the weather. As such, demand is ultimately the driver of the degree market. Imagine how tuition would drop like a rock if everyone decided to take a break from the college obsession.

Start a business and employ your friends.

This one is pretty self-explanatory but in case your business is thriving, try spending more time interviewing and learning about new people instead of slapping a "BA degree required" punchline on the job description.

Decide whether you need college

You can try delaying college, exploring different careers and learning options, then decide whether they actually need higher education. There's many other ways to find answer to this question. So do the research yourself or, see the list of college alternatives here.

Ok how can colleges make our life better ?

Colleges/unis should only offer programs for jobs that absolutely require a degree As bad as degree inflation and job regulation is, there are certain jobs that cannot have bad apples. Like doctors, nurses, lawyers and engineers. These jobs require years of training and preparation which makes self-teaching not enough for qualification. We would be better off going to college and save up time and money that would have otherwise been wasted through trial and error.

Colleges/unis should weed out courses that can be easily reproduced and self-taught, as well as unimportant ones.

I noticed that we have to go through a lot of subjects which can be easily learned at home ( especially during the COVID lockdown ) and learned somewhere else ( like LinkedIn Learning and Udemy ). Not only this could be a waste of time but also a waste of money for both college and students. If college was shorter and cheaper, we would find it slightly easier to repay debt and college can hire less teachers and professors. An added benefit to this is that professors wouldn't have to be burned out from teaching many classes in a row.

References

Forbes. 2020. Universities: Then And Now. [online] Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ccap/2017/08/25/universities-then-and-now/#adfc7f17c194 [Accessed 23 June 2020].

wikiHow. 2020. How To Start A College. [online] Available at: https://www.wikihow.com/Start-a-College[Accessed 23 June 2020].

Suggested readings

What is the true purpose of college ? : https://medium.com/modern-college/what-is-the-true-purpose-of-college-41434f47b824Colleges

Universities are Not What They Used to Be. Should You Bother Going?: https://medium.com/modern-college/colleges-and-universities-are-not-what-they-used-to-be-should-you-bother-going-da322462f7e8