I voted maybe as well.
Amongst other things, I'm a Registered Nurse Teacher and worked for six years as a senior lecturer in UK universities, so for my students getting their first degree is not merely 'worth it', it's essential for them to register as nurses.
For other subjects however, it can be a lot less clear cut.
Here in the UK, we went from 5% of school leavers going on to university under Thatcher, to (a target of) 50% under Blair. All that has achieved in functional terms has been to devalue a bachelors' degree and render it the default, 'bog standard', with a knock-on effect on the relative value of postgraduate awards.
When I was a student nurse (late 80s), all my tutors were educated to (first) degree level. Hardly anyone in nurse teaching had a masters and a doctorate was alomst unheard of except within elite research institutions.
Today, a doctorate is close to becoming the minimum required for even entry-level nurse lecturer posts. One could say that's evidence of my profession raising its game and that's partly true, but at the same time it has made a doctorate the 'bog standard' for nurse teaching and thus functionally devalued the award, turning it from the pinnacle of one's academic education to a mere tick-box exercise, necessary to gain employment.
Politics_Observer wrote:...you have to run a university as a business so that you can get those best and brightest minds over to teach at your university.
My first three years in higher education were spent whilst I was also in the military, but I still remember my first substantive conversation with my new boss at my first civilian job. I anticipated that we would talk about things like course design, curriculum development, research and teaching, but the entire conversation was all about income generation. His opening gambit was that the entire budget for the masters programme I had been recruited to run had been spent on my salary, so he needed to know what I could do to bring more money in.
That was eight years ago and I often reflect that I wish I had just stood up and walked away but at the time I needed the job so I bit my lip.
However it's clear that this commercialisation of education runs far deeper. Now that my academic focus is on research rather than teaching, it's also become apparent that funding for research is contingent upon the subject of any proposed research being something someone is willing to fund. Ergo, many things fail to benefit from research because no-one's interested - or at least interested in funding it. And though it seems obvious to me now, I hadn't previously appreciated that because you can only get funding for research that
someone else wants you to do, there's an immediate, inherent bias to that research because the funder is going to want you to find what they want you to find.
I'd far prefer all universities to be run as charitable, not-for-profit organisations rather than pseudo-commercial businesses but we're too far down the road to change course.
The knock-on effect to the 'worth' of a college degree then is that universities are only interested in fee-paying, 'bums on seats', so they don't give much of a toss as to whether their graduates will be flipping burgers afterwards. I know all universities send out follow-up questionnaires to graduates, to gauge their employability, so it would be interesting to see what data has been generated by those.