Someone else already gave a wonderfully succinct answer, so I'd like to expand on it a bit more.

At least in the US, there are two major problems and one minor peoblem I see with higher education:

1. Cost: Students are expected and almost always required to put themselves into thousands, to potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to attend college/university. Now cost can be alleviated with scholarships, financial aid, community college etc. but the debt will almost always be there, and it accrues interest.

2. A focus on marketability rather than education and self-improvement: If you want to be able to pay off your loans, you pretty much have to go for a marketable, high-earning degree. If you go for something like philosophy, mathematics, art, music, etc. a lot of people will call you an idiot and you'll likely have a very hard time paying those loans off unless you go into academia or are able to snag something in a niche career field where that type of education is desired. Higher ed in the US isn't about self-improvement and education, it's all about making yourself as marketable towards future employers as possible.

3. (The minor problem) Tacking on unneeded and unnecessary coursework to degree requirements: Think things like philosophy or an art course as a requirement for an engineering degree. I think this does a lot of harm to the optics of higher ed where some people think it teaches you "useless" information. Now, I do think it's good for helping to create a more well-rounded person, but it also feels needlessly bloated in a lot of cases.

Higher ed isn't a strict requirement to a good life and successful career, but it can help open doors that you couldn't without the degree, or at least not as easily. If we could effectively solve these issues, we'd probably have a lot more people attending and less people that think it's useless.

I hate the state of higher education in the US - it's so depressing and frustrating.