No it hasn't? That's some insane revisionist history, and this is what I blame Reagan for. The attitude that universities and even education broadly primarily or solely exist for producing vocational training
The original and, to this day, primary unique purpose universities serve is facilitating research. Capitalists try to claim credit for all the progress in science and innovation that's happened since the industrial revolution, but the institutions that evolved into what we now consider academia predate it significantly, and it's important to note that they were not always viewed even by their benefactors as having immediate value in a direct economic sense. Most of their educational capability is a side effect of developing competency in training new researchers. People who fell off this track still often got a quality education and became better-rounded, and also people who could get to a university tended to be high-status, so for a while it was a decent-fidelity signal for the competence-status mix that hiring decisionmakers cared about. Trying to get everyone in on this not only devalued that signal, but has caused a lot of this institutional rot. I think we agree on the end of that story but not the beginning of it
Vocational training and especially apprenticeship should be encouraged and enabled more, and shoehorning universities into this role was misguided from the start
ideas of how it should be and the actual circumstances today are completely different. That ideal is abusive because it is not reflected in reality, taking advantage of young naive adults.
The original and, to this day, primary unique purpose universities serve is facilitating research. Capitalists try to claim credit for all the progress in science and innovation that's happened since the industrial revolution, but the institutions that evolved into what we now consider academia predate it significantly, and it's important to note that they were not always viewed even by their benefactors as having immediate value in a direct economic sense. Most of their educational capability is a side effect of developing competency in training new researchers. People who fell off this track still often got a quality education and became better-rounded, and also people who could get to a university tended to be high-status, so for a while it was a decent-fidelity signal for the competence-status mix that hiring decisionmakers cared about. Trying to get everyone in on this not only devalued that signal, but has caused a lot of this institutional rot. I think we agree on the end of that story but not the beginning of it
Vocational training and especially apprenticeship should be encouraged and enabled more, and shoehorning universities into this role was misguided from the start