[DanAndersen]

The "everyone should go to college" attitude is a big contributor. Once our society got this idea that having everyone do the 9-to-5 40-year office career as an ideal, and started measuring the quality (and funding) of high schools based on how many students go on to college, you start getting career advisers telling students about how they should all be going into debt because "you don't want to be like those icky dumb construction workers right?". Then the market gets flooded with bachelor's degrees which are little more than an expensive status symbol to most.