Has the decline of knowledge work begun?

Bachelor Degrees need a complete rethink, it was basically modified finishing school for rich capital owners, needing to make their children of proper class before they could take over their businesses.

It then became a vocational degree for the working class, despite being completely detached from useful skills for a wide swathes of degrees. The only value is that you could talk the talk and become a member of the professional managerial class if you impressed the right hiring committee/individual.

In spite of this, we decided the working class should take out crippling loans to pay for this degree, and be in debt for the rest of their working life.

It's not sustainable, and just forgiving the debt only will make it all more expensive and less aligned with actual results we desire (useful workers).

I couldn't agree more with this. I'm a mature student who left school with nothing, joined and left the military with nothing, and managed to get a relatively decent paying public sector job. I decided to put myself through a bachelor's degree part time and self funded. I now have one, it's a nice piece of paper, but the skills I gained from it I likely could have got a lot cheaper on udemy. In fact udemy is very likely to be more up to date.

I obviously think the computer science degree is full of useful skills unlike a lot of degrees, but it's nothing I couldn't have got elsewhere.

With a kid in university I am torn because I know that having a degree actually means nothing in the job market, not like it used to.