It's an interesting question. I'd personally love to see more effort being given to "defend your point as succinctly as possible." I wrote a lot of "minimum word count essays and in the "real world" clarity trumps length every day.
Length is used as some proxy for rigor, but we know it's only a proxy.
I like this idea. Fwiw I feel I learned / grew a lot more in one technical writing class in college than I did in all my years of English classes. Later I picked ip a book “writing with style” that was also quite helpful.
One issue for me in English was I really was not interested in the kinds of essays the English teachers were interested in having us write, eg coming up with a thesis on plot themes in Shakespeare. Just not my thing and so I couldn’t get anywhere in those classes.
I found that in elementary or secondary school page minimums were used to as a cheap proxy for effort. In college page maximums started appearing to encourage concision. Different needs for students at different points in their education.
My high school English teacher adamantly refused to read any essay over the length of one page, double-spaced. I learned more from that class than any other writing class I took.
When I write today, for work, the challenge is always to write less. My VP might have time to read two pages; he's almost certainly not going to read anything longer.
Length is used as some proxy for rigor, but we know it's only a proxy.