If a 4 year degree is the bare minimum then college opportunities should reflect that. It should be possible to achieve without going permanently into debt.

1. State-subsidized loans and loose H1-B policies created that minimum. Or, to quote the Last Psychiatrist:

2. The part that's going to really have you scratching your head is, why did either of you need college when the job only requires a 9th grade education?

3. The late Dr Jerry Pournelle on How State Universities Are Screwing You:

Back about 1970 I was involved with the Council that was to draw up the Master Plan for the University of California system. The program was very structured: the University System would have a limited number of campuses, and would do all the graduate school education. There would be a limited number of undergraduates at each of those campuses, and they would be the elite applicants. Tuition would be low for state residents, and very high for out of state and foreign students. This would be the University system, and it would be for the best and the brightest. Salaries would be high for an elite faculty.

In addition, there would be the California State Colleges, which would not be permitted to award graduate degrees. They would do undergraduate education, and send their best and brightest to compete for places in the University system graduate schools. Their primary purpose was teaching, and it was on their ability to teach that faculty members would be chosen and retained: no publish or perish, because their purpose was to teach, not to do “research”. They were not to discover knowledge, but to convey it to most of the undergraduates in the state. A small number would go to the University undergraduate system, but about 90% of all undergraduates enrolled in state higher education would be in the California State Colleges. This would include colleges of education and teacher. Again the focus would not be on ‘research’ or anything else other than producing great teachers for the California schools.

Of course as soon as the Master Plan was adopted and funded, the California State Colleges began a political campaign to be turned into universities, with salaries comparable to the Universities, and graduate schools with research, and publish or perish, and all the rest of it; and instead of being teaching institutions they would become second rate copies of the Universities, with a faculty neglecting teaching in order to gather prestige in research and publication, or, perhaps, at least to look as if they were. In any event the California State Colleges became California State Universities, their commitment to actual undergraduate education was tempered to make room for the graduate schools, budgets were higher, costs were higher, and tuition, which had been designed to be very low, began to climb.

Ain't Socialism grand? Also read The Education Disaster:

As to my wife’s experience: after about 1950 the official policy of the State of California, adopted by the State Board of Education and enforced by the Superintendent of Public Instruction was that learning phonics is not learning to read, and therefore teachers should not waste time teaching phonics. During that period most of the tenured professors of education entered the university system,. They were told to believe that phonics was useless, so they did not learn how to teach children to read. Few professors of education have actually taught anyone to read, but they are expected to teach incoming undergraduates how to teach pupils to read. The result is predictable and in fact was predicted, by me as well as many others, when all this happened. The former Superintendent has subsequently admitted he was wrong, and apologized, but the education system is still a wreck, and 60% of students reading at grade level in high school is considered a good school. Since “read at grade level” doesn’t necessarily mean they can read books other than controlled vocabulary works, you may translate that as “only 40% illiterate”. How those kids are not to be left behind is a total mystery.

I myself worked for 2.5 years at the [REDACTED] package delivery company. It's an odd workplace: the drivers worked first shift, but were always out of the building (obviously). Three part-time shifts were employed: the preload, who sorted and loaded the package vans (3 AM to 7 AM), twilight, who unloaded those same vans (4 PM to 9 PM), and the hub, who unloaded, sorted and reloaded the high-cube semi trailers that ran our star network ground service (midnight to 5 AM).

Now, those part-time jobs did not pay well, but they carried full Blue Cross/Blue Shield coverage, so you had two types of people applying as part-timers: construction workers (who needed the insurance more than the wages, and who stayed part-time), and college students.

No kidding: about half of the [REDACTED] package van drivers had college degrees. They could make more driving vans than they could using their degrees.

Imagine the effect this has. I call it pushdown: since [REDACTED] could hire these drivers, many high school grads (or dropouts: let's be honest, you're delivering packages for signatures) are now working at McDonalds.

This is systemic underemployment. It hurts everyone in America.

Currently, the H1-B system works by taking the wanna-be employer's word that no Americans are capable of the job.

Solution:

1. Approve any H1-B visa without questions, and
2. Charge a flat $30,000/year per H1-B visa. (And make extracting this fee from the visa holder a death penalty offense.)

If General Electric wants to hire an Indonesian Einstein to work on their next-gen nuclear reactors, they will gladly pay $30K a year for him.

If your local state university wants to hire an all-Indian (dot, not feather) IT staff, it will bankrupt them.

Easy peasy.