A "Good" Job

What does it mean to have a "good" job in America today? Is it the amount of money you make? How happy it makes you? How prestigious the field is? Especially in the shaky economy of today, more and more parents are worrying about sending their kids to pricey colleges without the promise of decent work afterwords.
It is difficult to justify spending thousands of dollars a year to send your child to a place of higher learning, and the earlier justification had been so that they can get a "good" job. Yet, more and more students are moving back in with their parents or are unemployed and crippled by debt from student loans. This makes me wonder? Why is the American education system like this?
The idea is that anyone who wants to pay can go to school, which is great, in theory. But the cost of college is almost un-payable at this point for a lot of Americans. There was a swedish exchange student in one of my class(he later dropped out but that's beside the point) who was made if he was planning on going to college in the states, to which he replied, "Well, in Sweden, they lay for your college so...". Sweden isn't the only country who's government is funding higher education. In Germany, the only way to get into a Univeristy is to take and pass an extremely rigorous test. If you fail, fine, you can go to technical school or just straight up work. But, if you pass, the state will pay for all of your education. My question now is, if you don't pass the test, are you ashamed? Will the jobs you get with that education be "better" than those without it? And if you do lass, is it guaranteed that your sought-out college experience will mean higher income?
I don't know, I just thought that was kind of an interesting way to look at education and its purpose.