Yes, but this is also the preferred solution of the people who
caused the current crisis with university cost inflation.
Universities used to be expensive schools for rich people's failsons to "find themselves". That's why there's a lot of focus on "well-rounded" educations even today. Then western governments started offering taxpayer-funded tuition, which resulted in a new wave of educated kids who refused to believe government narratives regarding wars and refused to comply with conscription and drafts. This came to a head during the Vietnam War, where the US found that it's usual ability to start wars against labor in other countries had been stymied by them educating the enemy (their own workers).
While the draft has been relegated to a vestigial function in the US today, the people in power were able to shut the people down. Saudi Arabia, a theocratic dictatorship that belongs in the 10th century, not the 20th, did the American ruling class a solid by embargoing the US and shutting down our economy for a decade. This gave cover for the complete overturning of Progressive Era policies. Most importantly for this subject, public state universities were stripped of their government funding. Instead, they would charge ever-increasing tuition which students would pay for with loans. This ensured that the poor could not access education and that the educated middle class would be in permanent debt slavery.
Public universities went along with this because they were promised more money than they could get from public funding. This is why you see massive amounts of money being wasted by universities on bullshit. The ruling class gave universities a seat at the table of lavish excess in exchange for, y'know, letting the cops shoot their students with rubber bullets any time they get antsy. Your student debt is a bribe from the military-industrial complex to the university system that you pay for.
However, this gambit did not fully succeed. For one, students are still protesting, despite the debt noose around their necks, and university officials' best efforts to rubber-bullet their students into compliance. So there's a lot of politicians who want to get rid of university education altogether and replace it with trade schools. I may have harshed the concept of a "well-rounded" education before, but it does mean universities still have to teach things like history and economics, which is the sort of thing that makes the lower classes resist their social programming.
So a lot of people in power want to get rid of universities and replace them with trade schools. Now, I actually don't have a problem with trade schools; a lot of good paying jobs are going undone because they don't confer the kinds of status middle-class families want. But there's a lot of right-wingers who want kids in trade schools solely because trade schools generally do not teach all the problematic subjects and forbidden knowledge (aka "traditional coursework") that makes tools of society start asking questions.
If you want an actual way to fix universities (without just turning them into trade schools):
- Have a ONE TIME student debt forgiveness event, contingent on shutting down the student loan system, so this shit doesn't happen twice.
- Restore public university funding sufficient to allow tuition-free education for all poor and middle class students.
- Purge the university administrative class, they've grown overbloated and turned universities into their own personal hedge funds.
Once this is done, then we can start talking about what classes and degrees actually have good ROI on the public money the universities will be getting again. The thing is, though, the existing "low ROI" degrees mainly existed so the university administrative class could pump up admissions numbers. Remember, that was part of the deal they made with the devil. Taking away the student loan system means there's less incentive to admit students to prop up numbers, but if that becomes an issue again, we can further require minimum standards for students or courses through the university funding mechanism.