"Wasn't it a deliberate policy in the Soviet bloc to produce a surplus of people with university degrees so they wouldn't have to pay them that they were paying skilled blue collar workers?"
I can't speak for the Soviets. But the only people in Romania who made a lot of money were the racketeers. Everybody else was kinda the same. It was more about who you knew than how much money you had. So, it's misleading to think about the east block countries in terms of money.
Providing a university education was a real achievement ... so many people who had recently been considered social refuse, got to go to college. Say anything you like about the commies, but the educational system was good. What I liked about it (same with the French) is that they taught you useful stuff in a rational way. There was way less bs than in American schools. In American schools there were multiple choice tests!!!! Have you any idea how weird that is?
In Romania/France you were just supposed to know the answer, or at least know how to work a problem.
Consider how things are when college attendance goes down, as now in the U.S.
(Personally, I think people should finish their education in their mid teens and then get a good 10-15 years of traveling around and learning/apprenticing, learning languages, making friends in distant places, taking higher-level courses if they need to/are interested, and then maybe family. Of course that would require a sane international civilization.)
They keep work and school apart too long. It's silly and unnatural, and it's to the detriment of both.
j.