Real talk:
I graduated a few years ago with an Ivy League STEM degree and I firmly believe that private universities are the biggest scam in America. There is basically no oversight over how they operate and they are full of corruption. So much money is wasted on frivolous things and students are given very little preparation for the real world and the objective of actually finding a career. I was told not to worry about finding a job because "You have a degree from [X] school, anyone will hire you!" and also flat out given misinformation by the career office about my prospects.
Academia is also pretty much a pyramid scheme. Just think about it, every professor needs a certain number of graduate students for their research to occur, and most graduate students are trying to get a tenure-track job. That's a system that is unsustainable. I have known many grad students (in STEM) who told me they only went to grad school because they realized they couldn't do anything else with their degree. I really do believe that many professors encourage/mislead undergrads into going to grad school for this reason.
Thankfully I graduated debt-free for two reasons: a) I got a 50% in-state tuition discount in the specific program I was in, and b) my grandfather left money in his will for us to go to college. However it cost my family about $120K out of pocket, if you include tuition, housing (they also forced us to live in the dorms freshman year; after that I moved off-campus which was significantly cheaper), textbooks, etc.
They didn't give us any financial aid even though my family's income was not high, especially by the standards of our local area, and I know many people whose families were richer than ours in terms of "stuff" but got financial aid from that school. The financial aid system pretty much punishes families for being frugal. A family with a higher income and no savings because they spent all their money on luxuries, will receive more financial aid than a family with a lower income who saved money.
I say "thankfully" I graduated debt-free because that school was a horrible place (multiple students killed themselves during my time there and there were so many students having mental health crises that not only were all the school counselors booked, but so were all the counselors in town and the local hospital). I didn't even want to go there in the first place (I got full scholarships to two other colleges, one in my home city), but my wonderful mother gave me the choice between going there or homelessness because anything else was "not good enough" for her and would make me a failure in her eyes. I went to a public gifted high school and honestly there was a lot of brainwashing going on from the high school guidance counselors, etc. basically implying that unless you went to an "elite" college, you would never reach your full potential and never be successful in life. Now the people I know who went to state and local schools or even community college are doing just fine.
As for me it's basically been a recovery process of learning all the stuff about the real world I should have learned at college. I worked in a low-paid dead-end job for two years (it was related to my field of study) and now I am training for a career (software development) that doesn't require me to enroll in formal schooling. That's actually how I got into QVC. Playing the Youtube livestream in the background helps me to concentrate while I'm coding.
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