Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

We do have more drop outs, and people taking 6-7 years to "finish".  That is part of my point.  We send people with below average education ability to college, a lot of them.  Europe doesn't (except by error).  The students get "streamed" pretty early on in K-12 and it's tough to move up a stream.

We also spend more per student K-12 than other larger European and Asian countries.

We have an egalitarian approach that "everyone" should go to college.

Yes, we do.  Pure "lack of funding" is not the big problem in public education.  What we do with that funding is the big problem.
Just like in every other government program, including--re the budget discussion on the other thread--our national defense programs.

  I was advocating the idea that kids need to leave high school with more than just a job skill.

Hotties phone numbers for instance

Plenty of folks are not interested in, well, culture.  You can have them sit through a class on the classics or whatever, and it does zero good with very few exceptions.  Some think we should teach things like how to budget in HS.  OK, practical, and certainly a lot of folks may NEED that training, but would they pay attention any more than most did in Health class back in HS?

Where did courses on "classics" get into the discussion?  I never mentioned them.
I blame it on Badge.

This conversation is missing a major culprit:  standardized testing.  Our reliance on automation is victimizing the educational system, too.  Everything is multiple choice, which inflates scores (but hey, they can be graded in 30 seconds by a machine!).  
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Test prep, teaching to the test, funding tied to test results......it's all a big part of the broken wheel.

Back in the day, I was a TA for four years in grad school because my professor lacked funding for my project.  Each year you taught sort of earned you an advancement in the level of labs you had, so for two years I taught the senior lab courses.  These were mostly kids going to med school, probably 2/3rds of them.

I had a quiz before we went to the lab and I'd have an extra credit question that had nothing to do with chemistry, it was usually history.  I recall once asking when the US Civil War started, I was prepared to give credit for anything within say 5 years.  I had answers like 1920 and 1542 and 1608, all over the map.

These were the top students, pretty much, at a university ostensibly in the top five of public schools in the nation.  Most of them were "what do I need to do to make an A"? types.  I did have one guy who was a TRUMPET major, seriously, one of my best students ever.  He said he just liked chemistry.

The responses to similar questions were similarly "lacking" for the most part.

I was just using it as an example of a major that won't get you very far, on its own.

Oh, yeah.  There are plenty more of those.
And then there is the problem of solid majors (or grad degrees) in fields that just happen to be overloaded with qualified applicants.
So, back to "education" (as opposed to "training"), is the ideal college education one that is strictly transactional?  You pay $x for it and you may expect $y annual income in return?
I'm tossing these questions out at the same time I agree with what seemed like your main point--that we send too many kids to college, that many of them are wasting their time and money there.
Your example upthread of the community college education that can net you a $65k starting salary strikes me as an example of where someone can get trained for a certain professional track, but who has not been educated in the sense that "education" at least once meant.
I "feel" pretty well educated in the liberal arts.  But I know that I have huge gaps in the other end of my education.  I should have been required to take more math and science.  I wish all the time that I knew statistics.  I wish I had had to take more foreign language courses and/or demonstrate some foreign language proficiency.
Then I would feel more fully educated.

I think you can educate yourself in the liberal arts. You can teach yourself a foreign language too. Maybe math??

(I know I needed to see the professors work problems to understand properly.)

Unless you have access to labs and other expensive equipment, you can't teach yourself science, engineering, etc.

As for a manufacturing degree, what you'd get is an Associate of Applied Science.

https://www.harpercollege.edu/academics/manufacturing/manufacturing-technology/index.php

There are a good number of certificate programs too, that could set you up for a good job after only one year.

I'd call those training, for sure. The AAS has some breadth in the program.

Yes.  I've done that to a good degree, my graduate degree in "History" notwithstanding.
Our local community college, which is free for any H.S. graduate in the county with a "C" average, with all its multiple campuses and nice symphony orchestra, is academically non-rigorous.  I've taught U.S. History there as an adjunct instructor and, as I was telling SFBadger earlier on this thread (I think), my AP U.S. History course requires far more of the students than that one did.
It's possible that some of its other fields require more, but I understand that if you really want to learn, for example, nursing, you're better off going to the the local "tech" college than the CC.