How many jobs really require college?

The point, at least in this case, is that the author is counting on being treated as a serious thinker at the table of ideas. He is relying on our good faith to promote ideas that are fundamentally incompatible with the existence of exactly the kind of dialogue he's being given on this site. Do not think, should he win, that he will afford you the same charity.

Criticizing someone who uses dialogue in bad faith is an exercise in futility. It's better to recognize their actions before hand and label them as such -- a sophist, or a pseudophilosopher, or whatever. That won't stop them from speaking (nor should we want it to), but it gives us the power to redirect dialogue towards more serious participants.

Edit: I realize that I didn't make this clear: criticizing the easier thing is not sophistry. At the worst, it's poor argumentation. Sophistry involves using rhetoric to hide intellectual bankruptcy and bad faith.

Does it matter? At what point do we put the failure of the student on the student? Education being unaffordable is a broadly sympathetic position. Not getting an education because you couldn't be troubled to take advantage of a free education is an unsympathetic position.

You're giving too much credit to students, they don't know what is best for them. This $100k will be exploited in some way by profit-seeking companies before you have a second to glance back at the money.

This plays right into the author's point. It's exploitation to culturally coerce young people into large amounts of debt to purchase a degree in communications or international studies, only to end up tending bar or hauling trash.

Instead, under the author's plan, they could have tested the waters of secondary education at 14 or 15, decided it wasn't for them, got a job hauling trash and be a mortgage-free home owner before they're 25.

In regards to the article, I think the general direction of his ideas that we should send fewer people to college is wrong. One of many reasons for thinking that is that a lot more jobs will be eliminated by automation and the only way for people to have a chance at a great, productive life with enough money to live on and do the things he describes (live in a safe place, things to do, access to doctors, and most importantly craft beer), will be to have education that allows one to do creative work that is harder to replace with automation. People will have to study things that align with that creative work, and possibly reeducate themselves as they go along in life (like most programmers are constantly doing). Many of those fields he listed that people could do without extra education are likely to be automated away (financial adviser, executive, or a marketing manager).

Apprenticeship systems would only exacerbate that problem.