Americans continue to spend oodles and oodles of money to send their children to get
undergraduate degrees. The NYT reported that college seniors had an average of $24k of debt when they graduated.
We're not the only ones. According to Bloomberg, getting into a McDonald's run training program has a lower acceptance rate than high school seniors applying to Harvard:

“I’m thrilled and proud to attend Hamburger University,” said Zhou, who in 2007 started as a management trainee in the central Chinese city of Changsha, a job for which she and seven others were among 1,000 applicants. That’s a selection rate of less than 1 percent, lower than Harvard University’s record low acceptance rate last year of about 7 percent, according to the school’s official newspaper.All this -- in spite of recent evidence confirming the obvious in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Amazon affiliate link) that (surprise!), college students, well, just don't learn that much
...for nearly half of undergraduates, the freshman and sophomore years result in absolutely no significant gains in skills like critical thinking, writing, and complex reasoning. (Vanity Fair)