If colleges that don't produce economic return for their students close that's bad for the town, but overall good for the students and the US as a whole.
It's not that simple. Students don't really choose colleges based 100% on their outcomes. They choose based on cost, curricula offerings, luxury factors, brand recognition, and so on. Many of the colleges that close in the future will probably be perfectly good ones with good value that just become increasingly less attractive as they are forced to take less students and cut staff over time. Less choices is not good for the US as a whole. It means that the average American will have to travel farther from home to go to college to study what they want to study.
Maybe. But last I checked the trades pay horrible and destroy your body by 40. Every story of the trades pay well is just "be a trades business owner" well okay, but basically every alternative "be a X business owner" pays better.
Plumbers charge like 200/hr if you get to the point where you work for yourself that seems pretty good?
If you own your own business and can ensure enough clients you can make good money. But this isn't exactly a default situation. And it comes with all of the associated overhead for owning your own business. If you are a one-person show you'll also need to be available at weird times for emergencies or will lose clients because you aren't available on a weekend to deal with some issue.
Plenty of people working in the trades are making modest salaries working for some builder or some company that serves industrial clients.
And the best part is that even when the labor shortage ends, the myth that the credential was ever necessary is permanently broken.
Lol fat chance. Credentials are necessary for advanced civilization. They exist to facilitate the cooperation of strangers. Do you want to deal with uncredentialed doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers, finance managers, etc.? It is a quite idiotic that you need credentials to be a plumber but not a software engineer. Thankfully there is a strong preference for credentials. But the ridiculous calls for no credentials…
I have dealt with lawyers plenty, and I choose them by reputation and referral, not credential. I neither know nor care where any of them went to law school. Lawyers used to train by apprentice rather than school and it would be just fine if they did today too. Same with doctors. They still do train by apprentice, it's just called "residency." And similar to lawyers, I neither know nor care where they went to med school. And although every doctor I have ever seen has the proper credentials, I have never seen a profession where incompetence abounds quite like the medical one. As for engineers, I am an uncredentialed engineer, so... And just like lawyers, I have hired plenty, and the best way to hire engineers is also by referral, not by credential.