This entire situation is something that is predictable, and I have personally called it out years ago - not because of some unique ability, but because this is what happened in India and China decades upon decades ago.

There’s only so many jobs which have you a good salary.

So everyone had to become a doctor lawyer or engineer. Business degrees were seen as washouts.

Even for the job of a peon, you had to be educated.

So people followed incentives and got degrees - in any way or form they could.

This meant that degrees became a measure, and they were then ruthlessly optimized for, till they stopped having any ability to indicate that people were actually engineers.

So people then needed more degrees and so on - to distinguish their fitness amongst other candidates.

Education is what liberal arts colleges were meant to provide - but this worked only in an economy that could still provide employment for all the people who never wanted to be engineers, lawyers or doctors.

This mess will continue constantly, because we simply cannot match/sort humans, geographies, skills, and jobs well enough - and verifiably.

Not everyone is meant to be a startup founder. Or a doctor. Or a plumber, or a historian or an architect or an archaeologist.

It’s a jobs market problem, and has been this way ever since the American economy wasn’t able to match people with money for their skills.