What is your actual goal? Is it to get a job immediately, with as little extra time and education as possible? Is it to find a stable career? Is it to maximize long-term income potential? The answers are different.
If the goal is immediate employment, then your kid should go to the local CC and take one of the many certification/career training courses they offer. Depending on your offerings, they may even be able to take these classes in HS -- my kids' school has career path options that range from culinary to assisting in a local nursing home to database management stuff. Many kids graduate with full-time jobs. Or go to work as an apprentice plumber/electrician. Or go into the military and do college after using GI Bill benefits.
Of course, many of the jobs available that way have limited income potential options without a lot of additional training/education -- nursing home assistant, line cook, etc. So if you want to maximize long-term career potential, then you're looking at a four-year college. But the real secret about college is that the specific degree doesn't matter that much to getting a job. Sure, if you want to be an engineer, then you need an engineering degree; if you want to do computer science, you need a CS degree. So if your kid wants to be an engineer, then by all means, that's a great option (that's my kid currently).
But you don't have to be an engineer to get a good job. There are many, many jobs out there where the degree honestly does not matter. Because it's not about specific skills, like how to chop an onion quickly and safely. It's about learning the basics of your chosen path, and then learning how to learn the rest. I'm a lawyer; I have seven years of post-HS education. You think they teach you the law in law school? LOL. They teach you the framework -- the general principles -- of a bunch of different areas. But really they teach you how to teach yourself what you need to know after you graduate and start working -- where the resources are, how to find the most recent cases or rules on your issue, how to put together an argument, how to write and argue effectively, etc.
So what does matter in college more than the degree itself? What are the factors that set your kid up for one of those jobs that doesn't hyper-focus on one specific skillset?
1. College reputation/program reputation/alumni network. Note this doesn't necessarily mean Harvard. If you want to stay local, your local public university probably has the best local connections. You want to maximize your kid's chances interviewing by having a strong alumni network to call on and a solid reputation in the area your kid is studying.
2. Grades/classes taken. By and large, employers are going to want to see that your kid took demanding classes and did well in them. Not because the actual substance or grades matter. But because the grades are a proxy for your kid's level of effort and drive and intelligence. Employers want smart, driven, diligent employees. They can't tell that based on a 15-minute interview. So grades and choice of major are one of the ways they can feel comfortable that your kid will show up every day and try to do a decent job.
2.a. The corollary to 2 is that your kid should choose a major that they find sufficiently interesting that they're willing to put in the work to do it well. Again: most employers want to see drive and willingness to learn. A kid who is motivated to pull straight-As in a history degree is likely going be more appealing for most jobs than one who parties his way to a C- engineering degree.
3. Internships/part-time jobs. See alumni network above. These are useful for your kid, because they can help provide a peek into different career paths. But what they are really useful for is giving your kid contacts at various potential future employers. You know the whole "it's not what you know, it's who you know"? This is what that means. Not in any bad nepotism kind of way. It goes back up to 2: employers want people who are diligent, driven, and smart enough to do what needs to be done. There is no way to judge that in a 15-minute interview. OTOH, if someone's already worked there for some period of time, it's a much easier hire.
4. And for the love of Pete, please God learn to communicate -- to write, to reason logically, to speak effectively. Your school and degree will get you your first job. But every single job you get after that is based on all the "soft" skills you learned that weren't official parts of the degree. Showing up on time. Self-control. Initiative. Emotional intelligence. Ability to communicate. My DH and I took very different paths -- I'm a lawyer, he's an engineer (uber-geek, too: Ph.D in electrical engineering). You know why we've done well? We both communicate effectively. I have to translate highly complex regulatory requirements to my clients, and when they screw it up, I have to communicate their story back to the regulators or to the court in a compelling way. He has to translate between the technical people who are doing Ph.D-level advanced research and the business people with BAs in Political Science and MBAs and wouldn't know a mosfet if it bit them in the ass. The substance of the areas we got our degrees in is just the foundation knowledge; the actual work we do involves all the other skills we built on top of that.
Note that this last point is why I have told my daughter to take classes beyond her major (engineering). Everyone should take a basic business class to learn how businesses operate. Everyone should take sufficient writing classes to communicate effectively. Everyone should take enough math and statistics classes to be able to use those basic skills should they become necessary on the job. Etc.
The idea of liberal arts gets routinely denouced as fluffy rich-people privilege. But this is really what it's all about. Life isn't about a specific set of skills -- at least if you want to move beyond entry-level. A targeted degree with a specific skillset is fine; it will very likely get you a job, and if you enjoy the work, you can live a pretty happy life doing that forever, or learn on the job if you want to move up. But the rich and powerful play the long game; they don't have to worry about that first job, so they can afford to focus on building the knowledge and skillset and connections that will serve them well long-term. So if you can afford to send your kid to a four-year school, by all means, help them think about their career path and take the classes and internships to get them there. But play the long game as well as you can; make sure that your kid has enough understanding of a wide variety of topics to make it as easy as possible to grow beyond that first job.