I agree with you to a certain extent. It is very likely that degrees are excessive for at least some of the people getting them, and shorter, cheaper alternatives may be beneficial and well worth society looking at. Part of the issue might be that education operates as a "signal", and this can then go through inflation. Students get a degree to set themselves above school leavers, but with so many getting degrees they then need a higher degree (Masters) to set themselves up another rung, and so on.
Anyway, where is there a problem here: who's paying to train people, then?
Degrees indicate a certain amount of ability and hard work, never mind a plethora of transferable skills (computer use, communication, writing, etc.) that are in demand. That's even if the subject isn't relevant to their degree, and of course it often is. Lower level qualifications may lack this level of discrimination.
You are then asking corporations to take this on - fewer or lower qualifications to assess candidate quality (and their staff impact the quality of their operations), and potentially to train them up in a lot of skills, which costs the companies money. Apprenticeships mostly went the way of the dodo for this reason: why does an employer want to take the risk and expense? Not least because in an era where it's no longer a "job for life" and people frequently change employer, an employer trains someone only for that person to take those skills elsewhere.
Scrapping degrees, or drastically reducing them, is thus not as easy as you might think because it's not just a HE issue, it goes all into employment, workforce and corporate issues too: it's a major headache that requires a lot of joined-up thinking and societal consideration, with a lot of competing interests at play. One might argue just let the market decide in a capitalist economy: if higher education is a "bubble", do nothing and let there eventually be a crash.
