* according to the UCLA CIRP freshman survey
I wanted to learn a new language and I wanted to take some history courses that covered regions and eras not well covered in my high school courses. But despite my university having a significant "elective" component to my degree path, none of those courses were on the list of allowed electives for my degree. So in this case, the university was failing at a focus on education by hindering my ability to branch out away from my core studies and requiring that I take "electives" that were more closely associated with the imagined career path my degree would provide.
On the flip side, the "core" courses for my degree were bogged down in academic minutia and exercises that bore only the most surface level resemblance to the things I've done in my actual career. Often the taught material was out of date relative to the state of the industry. Other times the material was presented with philosophical reasons for learning the material, but with no practical application backing it to help make that philosophy complete. And very little material (if any) covered the usage of tools of the industry. In this case, we're failing the goal of setting people up for their careers by not teaching the practical applications of the knowledge. And to be clear this isn't just a "learning examples are by necessity simplified examples" problem. I later went back to school at a local community college for different material and from day one those courses were more relevant and more up to date. They provided material that was immediately useful in real world applications of the underlying knowledge. And I think some of that was because many of the courses for that community college were taught by industry veterans, either part time or as a "retirement" gig.
In short, my experience at a large university was indeed a series of boxes that were to be checked, ostensively to provide me a "well rounded" education, but practically all narrowly focused on getting me a job in the field. Yet the boxes also failed at being relevant enough to the state of the industry to actually give me a foundation to work from when starting my career.
Always follow the money
The stated rationale at the time was that degree holders earn more, so if everyone gets a degree, everyone will earn more. I am doubtful that was the true rationale but it's how the policy was sold to people.
These days you need a college degree just to afford a 1 bedroom apartment by the time you are 40.
When we're talking about college costs, public schools are really the only institutions that matter. The Ivies (or even Ivy+) are a rounding error compared to the big midwestern land-grant universities and the UC and Cal State systems.
States have substantially reduced their per-student support for universities: https://www.ppic.org/publication/higher-education-funding-in...
This coincides with federal funding programs, but student loans are famously not dischargeable, which makes them more instruments of social control than conventional financial vehicles.
Yeah, that's when the great "push for education" came, as well as neoliberalism which preached continuous hustling and individuality. And in the 90s, the ADA and other anti discrimination laws hit, and requiring a college degree was and still is a very useful pre-screening filter for HR to continue discrimination.
For me the impact of the university administrators as they chased higher endowments for more buildings with naming rights and expanded their own bureaucracies with direct hires that did not directly contribute to the faculty mission did more to alter the university experience than anything else.
[0]: https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year