I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears

Speaking only for STEM, an elite STEM program gives the student access to a bigger variety of upperclassman courses; compare the available course list for a community college vs a large university and the difference is quite noticeable. The better programs also provide access to better equipment and advising; e.g., various University of California campuses have their own on-site chip fabrication labs. If the career trajectory you're planning benefits from those advanced courses, going to the better STEM programs is going to help tremendously. If not, well, they don't but that's hardly the institution's fault; they aren't choosing who to send your resume to, you are.

(As an aside, I use the word "access" very intentionally; educational institutions don't "confer" anything. Students get access to resources and opportunities and they choose which to take. It's entirely possible to do the minimum to fulfill requirements; for example, I chose easy courses to do the minimum fulfill my humanities requirements because it wasn't where my interests lay.)

I'm not talking about the obvious exceptions like medicine or law (though even that can be done as a conversion rather than an undergrad degree) or anything else where you literally need the paper that says you can do it. I'm also not talking about becoming a researcher, where obvious you need to know a bit of X to become a professor of X. I'm talking about the vast number of degrees that are not job specific. Business, economics, history, literature, and so on with humanities, but also math, chemistry, physics, and biology.

There is no real reason an employer would care what you studied, because as a new graduate your job is to learn the business. Whether you were interested in one thing or another in college doesn't matter much, the main line is between math-tech stuff and not-math-tech stuff. Employers who reckon their work is techie will gravitate towards those graduates, while others will be open to anyone.

All the degree signals is that you somehow gathered yourself and read a bunch of books and solved a bunch of questions. That's somehow supposed to be evidence that you can learn their business.

Of course the problem is there's plenty of people who instead of learning Krebs cycle could just go directly into finance or accounting or any number of jobs without jumping through the hoops. The issue is that college has become a destination for so many smart kids, it's hard to imagine a smart kid who skips it. So absolutely everyone feels they need to go to college, and absolutely every employer thinks they need to hire just college grads.

In terms of helping the economy, it's really not efficient. Everyone has to sit around for three or four years when they really want to be working, and everyone who can't find the money/time to do it is cut out from middle class aspirational jobs.

Sure, if you can ace leetcode like an olympiad, you can become a L7 at FAANG. However, if you are a MBA from San Jose state, you would be working as a financial analyst. However, if you are a Stanford MBA, you would be a SVP.

Top tier firms in PE, VC, IC, and top tier consulting companies still go for elite colleges. Why? That is the path to c-level positions (not leetcode). Same thing for big law. Same thing goes for Washington consensus (the cesspool of Beltway), where pedigree matters.