Having any degree and some social skills can get you a white collar job. While not glamorous it beats shoveling holes (unless you're smart/practical/brave enough to make good money with some sort of physical labour).
That's useful to you since you can make a somewhat easy living. Useful to society? I mean sort of, in most jobs you achieve _something_. The fact that we're inefficient and often build the wrong thing that's useless is more of a failure of the human race in general..
That's credential inflation. Saying we require any degree to do this job means the degree is irrelevant. It's like Occupational licensing. Putting up barriers between people with low paying jobs to pursuing higher paying jobs which cannot be overcome without sinking a lot of cost. This country in the past did fine without requiring that license, as do many competing countries today.
I don't think it's purely inflation. A degree shows you can show up to a place for 3-4 years and do something. That's all you need for a lot of jobs so preferring those who have a piece of paper saying they can do that makes some sense.
I live in Europe where university is free or quite cheap so asking young people to do it for a couple years isn't the worst.. it's quite fun. And I say this as someone who dropped out to work in software engineering instead.
I suppose there's a difference when many educational programs in the US leave students with 6 figure debts that saddle them with the equivalent of a mortgage before they ever enter the labor force.
