BT, I've explained this before, but I'm going to do it again.
We, as a society, have long gone down the path of basically training kids to accept the fact that they need to go to college if they want to get anywhere in life. Whether adults in their lives push a narrative that if they don't go to college, they'll wind up working some dead-end "loser" job like a fry cook or janitor, or the job market itself insisting on a college degree for positions that, thirty years ago could've been obtained with room to advance on just a high school diploma.
This goes hand-in-hand with the fact that our job market has become increasingly-tailored towards the tertiary and quaternary sectors, where any applicant is going to be working some form of office job with basic computer skills. In that job market, unless your company is specifically in the STEM field, most companies aren't going to care about the "quality" of your major. Art History, English Lit, Philosophy, Humanities...all most companies are looking for someone with a college degree and decent grades, because that demonstrates that they have the basic skills needed to perform a passable job in an office environment.
Now, don't get me wrong. STEM is still widely going to provide better job opportunities. But a lot of college graduates were sold a bad bill of goods as to how enrolling in college was going to work out for them, and the colleges themselves do not do a good job of helping convert those degrees into gainful employment. It does not help that a lot of the office jobs that these college degrees are well-suited for have been diminishing in number and availability, because of the current workforce. People who got those office jobs thirty years ago are living longer, and have to work longer before they can reasonably retire, so they're keeping their jobs and preventing new blood from entering the job market like they did.
So it's really not as simple as saying "they took out a loan, they knew what they were getting into", because they didn't fully know what they were getting into. And furthermore, in many cases, they were sold a service (their education) and did not receive the full benefits to that service (gainful employment, as has been pushed as a benefit of college education for decades).