This attitude is part of a more general cultural shift. Back in the 1960s, the majority of students said the primary motivation for going to college was to develop a philosophy of life, and a minority said the main goal was to be very financially successful. Somewhere around the 1980s this started to shift and the proportions are now inverted.
I would also say some of the attitude shift is also contradictory. The amount of people I interact with who have a lot of bad things to say about the education who tell me universities should focus on education in a general meanwhile also say that schools to should focus on student getting jobs. Probably one that has been heard before, something along the lines of, "why don't high schools teach plumbers courses." I mean they can. While also, "colleges are too focused on checking the boxes so students can get jobs."
It's not inherently contradictory to hold both positions, if your overarching position is that the schools are in a weird in-between state that serves neither well. My time in school was marked with both forms of frustration.
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 Often the taught material was out of date relative to the state of the industry.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.
And there were fewer students going to university and so you had a higher proportion of people doing it for the love of learning. It was easier to get a job without a degree. It's not just a cultural shift, it's a change of supply and demand.
Notably, the late 70’s and early 80’s is when large scale social changes started to happen due to high inflation and major problems in the US economy. Also a lot of social unrest, and a pretty unhinged president (Tricky Dick).
The same issues are seen in other countries. It's not specific to US presidents or policy. The insistence on maximizing university attendance was a widespread idea coming out of the left, e.g. in Britain it was heavily pushed by Tony Blair. The Blair government also raised tuition fees considerably.
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.
We (America) made university educations super expensive. Causality is complicated, but it probably started as an effort to destroy the anti-war movement in the 70's.
"Most financial experts attribute he sudden increases that started in the 1970s with an influx of federal funding designed to make college more affordable."
> Somewhere around the 1980s this started to shift and the proportions are now inverted.
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.
It's also as I recall when tuition and student costs started to spike in the US which is probably more directly related than some "philosophical" change in the zeitgeist[0]. When students and parents start racking up debt like this, you become very interested in the fastest way to pay it back.
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.
* according to the UCLA CIRP freshman survey