If we go along the route of "asking the government to ban every line of business where people waste money getting no value for it or even getting harmed, being driven by systematic delusion", as it is with the higher education - we will shoot ourselves in the foot in a massive massive way as this will kill almost all web startups as this is what they are - use manipulative tactics, knowingly false expectation and social effects to force people to spend money on... well nothing really. And the lower your chance of getting something in return, the more you pay (classic example are dating apps). I go to startup events frequently. Took me a few years to accept the truth that speaking about any industry (their slang for it is "vertical") - well, any except porn - like dating, pharma, so-called "nutra", etc. they actually mean "scam in the field of X", and the main idea of every successful one is "a genius way to obscure it is a scam".

For God's sake, it will even kill custom software development which most people sitting here, do for a living - because it is the same exact thing - vast majority of clients never get what they want and even if they did they won't be able to make the money on the useless "products" they invented, because this is nothing but a systematic delusion that's moving them. Almost all of them see themselves as genius inventors of the next world-changing thing but they are in fact random nobodies who raised cash from other random nobodies, to waste it on something that makes their contractors laugh so badly they even refrain from doing video calls. It's even worse than higher education. I seen multiple software dev companies throwing lavish parties on the April Fool's day as "professional holiday of our clients".

Should we first look at ourselves in the mirror before blaming the college cabal for doing the same as we do ourselves, just more successfully?

I said is I don't see the utility in reducing the concept from a continuum to a binary "is/isn't"

You seem to have doubled down on the is/isn't perspective and demonstrated what I was referring to. The more you reduce the less useful your reasoning becomes.

No, with high student loans, you are not supporting high talents; you are supporting the rich only. You are obstructing a lot of potential that poor students might have realized if they could have afforded it. It's not about banning universities; it's about broadening accessibility. Schools are state-funded for the same reason.