There's a couple of preliminary hurdles you're going to have to clear - at least in my unfortunate experience... the teachers and professors (from elementary through graduate programs) - are no more, and in some cases even
less, capable of sorting fact from fiction than the general public. Sure this is much less common in the pure sciences... but not everyone has the desire or need for such education either. After all, one of the top aspirations of the current generation is to be an "Online Influencer". I understand that desire... but I'm not seeing STEM jobs as a fall-back for most of those people.
I'd say the primary problem with education here isn't actually the cost of it (although that
is a definite problem)... but the fact that there is essentially no review and/or promotion of competence on the part of the educators themselves. Same as it is with almost any public employee (I deal with them for a living) there is not only a lack of accountability - there's an active process to
promote incompetence. Have an employee that's stealing? Constant infighting? Absenteeism? Well, you can't fire them - so you recommend them for promotion into a different department... problem solved!
Throw in some policies which stipulate hiring based on some non-performant metric (i.e. race, gender, handicaps, prior public office, education level)... basically anything
other than actual experience... and you've got a great system for producing AudioQuest customers as you would put it.