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From 1999 To 2016, America Lost 11.4 Million People From the Workforce (washingtonpost.com)
Andrew Van Dam, writing for the Washington Post: Where did all the jobs go? Well, we're finally starting to find some satisfactory answers to the granddaddy of all economic questions. The share of Americans with jobs dropped 4.5 percentage points from 1999 to 2016 -- amounting to about 11.4 million fewer workers in 2016. At least half of that decline probably was due to an aging population. Explaining the remainder has been the inspiration for much of the economic research published after the Great Recession.
Disability
The answer is hardly as simple as automation alone. Many people are leaving the workforce altogether because they are able to live off of welfare (directly or indirectly), lack a proper education, or have any sort of criminal history which bars them from any sort of job, among other things. The book Men Without Work by Nicholas Eberstadt shows this and other cases as the reason for why 1/5th of men in the US today are not involved in the workforce whatsoever.
Many jobs are also outsourced to third-world countries which will perform those jobs for far cheaper than they would domestically, hence the recent attention around the H-1B visa abuse by US companies.
I think you have a great points, especially about these scam schooling systems (check out the book Fail U by Charlie Sykes if you want to see how badly colleges have become). But there is not one single area that is causing all of it, which makes solving it all the more difficult.