I don't think value will decrease, just more weight will be put on what school you were able to get into. Let in state college be free and let these state schools take the same # of students they take now (very near maximum dorm capacity anywhere), and acceptance rates will just plummet. College is hard to scale, you need to build and hire from a very limited labor pool to grow and it would probably take decades as a result.
Free college would just lower acceptance rates at good state schools and allow more people to complete degrees in community colleges. If anything it will make state school degrees even more valuable; roughly the same number of people will graduate from the same school but the cohort will be academically stronger.
IDK what you were imagining exactly with that last bit, but at my old uni you could test out of basically any class by paying $60 and taking essentially the final in the testing center; if you got >70% iirc you got credit for the course and could advance to the next but no a grade.
It's going to decrease value for the average student. It'll be ever more where you go than what you know.
If anything it will increase value? Don't buy it. What's your reasoning? Look at the value of college today on avg compared to that of 30 years ago and adjust inflation. People pay much more for what they get now than they did then, because of the saturation.
With the last bit - if you major in chemistry you don't have to take art or anything not chemistry. If you're art you take art. It's a sham that you're required to take all those other classes. They do very little for the vast majority, and if you want the knowledge you can take the classes as you'd like.
As the school becomes more selective due to a larger applicant pool, the degree becomes more prestigious and valuable, because it signals the school takes the very best applicants and therefore has the very best students in the ranks.
School shouldn't be job training only. I majored in a stem field and my favorite classes where the ones where I dove into classical literature, believe it or not. Sure, the degree got me my job, but it also exposed me to the liberal arts in a way that would have been impossible if I tried to study it on my own, because it actively challenged me to step into another field for a minute and reach out to unfamiliar sources to build understanding. There's value in being a well rounded, educated citizen, in my book. The academies of ancient Greece weren't training better farmers or builders, they were training better thinkers and therefore better citizens. That's what modern colleges try to do when they make you take liberal arts classes for an engineering degree. And a chemist who's taken time to learn to read, study, and write well is going to be a better professional chemist than someone who's just done grunt work in the lab and slogged through the chem series, because not only has that better scientist also done that, they've polished their intangibles through liberal arts classes.
Free college would just lower acceptance rates at good state schools and allow more people to complete degrees in community colleges. If anything it will make state school degrees even more valuable; roughly the same number of people will graduate from the same school but the cohort will be academically stronger.
IDK what you were imagining exactly with that last bit, but at my old uni you could test out of basically any class by paying $60 and taking essentially the final in the testing center; if you got >70% iirc you got credit for the course and could advance to the next but no a grade.