Very glad this was written and posted. However, it could have been shorter. If education were indeed the true social value, we could just improve the quality of public education, add an additional year or two to high school, and essentially fold the undergrad syllabus back into the public system. Simply, the purpose of college is to create a culturally separate managerial elite in society.
The basic problem is the legitimacy of the elite it has produced in the eyes of people subject to it. There was always tension, but code changed everything. PhD holding managers today are often functionally illiterate in their domain of responsibility, and that has a huge cultural impact.
There is reliable predictive power in explaining the culture wars of today as the reaction against a managerialist elite using radical cultural change in an attempt to dilute the bargaining power of competent working people, and to insulate itself from a working class from whom they are increasingly undifferentiated.
This is a pet issue of mine, and glad to see it's getting traction, as it's really the defining conflict of today.