Well as much as I appreciate your earlier points, I do want to comment:
> The culture around college necessity is incredibly frustrating. To make matters worse, when the subject comes up, many people say things like "Not going to college worked for you, but it tends not to for everybody else and it worked for me blah blah." It doesn't ever, every push the conversation forward. It's a weird, frustrating form of survivor-bias.
That it's you who's showing survivor-bias. The data as far as I'm aware of it, does indeed confirm, that a college degree is a net financial benefit, despite of course obvious substantial anecdotal evidence to the contrary that every person is familiar with (my friend xyz got a degree and he's doing shitty). I'm purely talking historically, and financially.
Even today I'm seeing a job market where you can't get a traineeship in most companies without a master's degree, as silly as that may be.
Also I want to stress that tech is very, very much an exception. A field where more than most, you can get access to jobs on the basis of your work, not your work in school. I feel HN underappreciates the difference with the rest of the population.
In terms of happiness, fulfilment etc, I can't speak on that.
Also, I can't speak on how this'll develop in next generations, e.g. for those going to college today or later this decade, but I suspect like most that there'll be a big paradigm shift making college way less appealing.
At the end of the day, the benefits of college can be seen as an arbitrage opportunity in the market. i.e., spend X money for education, get Y (which is > X) benefits in income in return. And like any arbitrage opportunity, X will increase in cost and Y will decrease, as more people are drawn to the opportunity, until it largely fades. (or worse, temporarily flips around due to oversupply, like we've seen in some industries, e.g. MBAs at various times, or lawyers recently).