Questioning College

      I'd like to know at what point we're going to stop telling our children that they need to "go to college to get a good job," and instead start telling them the truth.  The sad truth has become that these days, you have to go to college to get almost any job, or advance past a certain point in any field, and the "college experience" has become more and more expensive with each passing year.
I went to college after graduating high school because that's what I was told I should do to "get a good job," but after two and a half years there, I took time off because, in addition to dealing with crippling depression, I had no idea what the hell I was in school for.
I went in to college hoping to learn new, important life lessons and ways of achieving my hopes and dreams. Instead, I was forced to take courses in subjects completely irrelevant to anything I was interested in, as well as courses that had nothing they could actually teach me that I was not previously capable of doing.
When I questioned my ability to perhaps test out of courses that I felt I had already mastered, I was curtly informed that there was no way to do such a thing, and that I simply had to endure the courses for what they were.
I wanted to believe that there was something more to be learned in these basics that I was being re-taught again for yet another time in my life, but when I sat down with one teacher, she told me that with the skills I possessed, there was nothing she could teach me in her class.
I was floored.  How could it be possible that after how much money I was paying to be at this college, and how I had been assured that this was 'for my own good' that I attend these basic classes and learn all these things that I surely did not know, I had someone telling me what I'd ascertained all along. I already had all these basics, and I was being forced in to taking these needless credits for no good reason, except the only one I could establish.  The college was forcing me to take these classes, regardless of my own ability, to increase their overall income.
Why did they not have a way to establish the level at which each individual student was operating?  Even if there was an extensive test that I had to pay a certain amount to take, in order to prove where I should be in terms of advancing toward my degree, I would have been willing to do so.      There was no such thing, however, and I strongly believe that this feeling of hopeless resignation and despair lent itself to the debilitating depression that I experienced, ultimately leading me to take time off of college to figure out what it was that I needed to do.
It's been 5 years since I stopped going to college to figure everything out, and in that time, I got married, I've moved several times, I've continued work as a waitress and a bartender, and I've struggled to get by on money... The reason?  As of now, 5 years down the road, I still have almost $15,000 in outstanding student loans, and I have been paying on them the whole time; hundreds of dollars a month toward pointless credits I achieved at a university that cared more about how much money it could wring out of me than how much I was learning.
The establishment that I went to, I hesitate to call a college, because to me, and I feel like to most, the word 'college' implies a place of learning.  I went to place that was a business, and their merchandise was perfunctory information in return for being paid incredibly handsomely on money that was not even mine in the first place.
I've resigned myself to the fact that most businesses require a college degree to even call back for an interview, much less actually give a job, but I find that I have many friends that have acquired their expensive piece of paper, called a "degree," and yet they still have positions equal to myself in the customer service and retail industry because no one will hire them without experience.
Here is where we enter a point that gives me some sort of morbid amusement, a sick joke on those that finally achieved their sought after college degrees.  I say it provides me with a twisted sort of amusement simply because as I sit back now without my degree, and while I am in debt, it's moderately less than it could have been, had I continued to do what I was  'supposed to.'
All of these young people have been told 'go to college, get your degree so that you can get a decent job,'  but now that they have graduated?  The job market in inundated, flooded, with hundreds of thousands of young people who believed the lie they were told.  They bought it hook, line, and sinker.  Now they're stuck paying back tens of thousands of dollars while they apply for jobs that respond with 'sorry, you need more job experience before we'll consider you.'  How are they ever supposed to get job experience when no one will hire anyone without job experience?!
My husband and I, we are swimming, drowning, in debt, because he bought the lie, too.   He went to school, and he excelled.  He graduated with his bachelor's degree in economics in just 3 years, and immediately went on to graduate school where he graduated with his master's degree in public policy with a focus on economic development in just another 2 years.  My husband has a master's degree, and he works in a hotel where he makes $11 an hour.  No one will give him a second look because, regardless of the fact that he has this expensive piece of paper that states the schooling he had, and his abilities, he doesn't have enough experience in fields that are considered 'relevant.'  It doesn't matter to them that he has his degrees, nor that he is incredibly intelligent, driven, and capable of doing any tasks set down before him.
I am much the same in that I am intelligent, driven, and capable.  If you are able to teach me what you want, I can do it.  It's as simple as that.  I'm just as intelligent as most of the people I know that have a degree, I am merely less in debt and unpossessing of that incredibly expensive piece of paper.
Now I wait for all of you that tell me I should have finished college, just to do it so that I had a degree, to go out in the world and do what I wanted.  Though I do understand that mindset, that's what has led to what's occurring now.  Thousands of people with no idea what they want to do, jobs that won't hire people without experience in relevant fields that they can't get jobs in without experience, and then there's me.
I wish I were capable of feeding in to the lie.  I wish I had had the capability of finishing my college degree just so I could say I 'accomplished' this thing, but at this point, I'd like someone to take me at the merit of my person and my intelligence, and to give me the opportunity to prove that even though I don't have a degree, that doesn't make me worth any less.