[vollmond]

However, we have people taking out enormous loans to get educations in non-STEM fields that have much less chance of repaying the investment financially.

We as a society push everyone in every possible field towards college. Many of these could be apprenticeships, etc. There's no reason to spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn a lot of this stuff.

Even if we went back 40 years to when college was (compared to now) fairly cheap, a lot of fields wouldn't make sense in that environment.