And yet it appears in most countries, including Communist ones like China.

I’m not sure how we shoehorned “China Bad” into the discussion. But a country with a large public non-profit education system that’s insourced enormous amounts of industrial research and development isn’t a strong example of this model. On the contrary, the Chinese state has been particularly good at pulling domestic talent into domestic industry. It’s one of the excuses Americans regularly use to condemn Chinese manufacturers for “cheating” and “stealing” intellectual property. They’re not hiring a bunch of American Ivy League grads to run their businesses in Shanghai and Chengdu. They’re hiring and promoting from within.

That’s more due to family connections.

Eton’s family connections are economic connections. It’s one big aristocratic snarl. You’re rich because of who you know and you know these people because you’re rich.

The USA still has one of the best public university systems in the world.

20 years ago it did. Now our administrative overhead has exploded, our student-to-teacher ratios are shit, even historically prestigious state schools are becoming little more than diploma mills, and on top of all that you’ve got Trump snatching international students off campus and throwing them into blacksites based on spurious allegations of whatever-the-fuck has an online conservative frothing for blood.

Meanwhile, you can go to Berlin, Germany or Sao Paulo, Brazil or Melbourne, Australia or Singapore, China and get the same or better quality of instruction, facilities, and job prospects without the comical rent-seeking by privatized American institutions. Turns out undergrad organic chemistry isn’t something Americans have a monopoly on.

other countries have degree restrictions on their jobs as well

Which nation outside the US has anywhere near the level of college student debt? Canada and the UK are the only two countries that come close.

You keep pointing to things happening in the USA as a uniquely American

Americans pioneered the modern university system at the turn of the 20th century. That system began as a non-profit, research-oriented, academically focused public institution. And the idea of academic R&D spread globally, so that we now have university systems replicating the 20th century American model pretty much everywhere a large urban center exists to support it.

But then the Americans took a good, useful, public sector innovation and converted it into a mechanism for gatekeeping professional positions and rent-seeking young people. That particular model hasn’t metastasized as broadly as the former. Perhaps its just a matter of time. But it appears the root of the evil is the decision, back at the turn of the 21st century, to publicly defund university systems.

So much of the rot in US academia is driven by the privatization of the university model. Where you see the rot infiltrate other foreign universities tends to be where privatization has occurred the most rapidly.