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 Often the taught material was out of date relative to the state of the industry.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.
Where I am at, you can learn a skill in high school either via elective or a career technical track like working on airplanes, HVAC, construction, etc. Back in the 90s, I took automotive electives because I liked to work on cars back then. It would prepare you to work at a small automotive shop or as a hobby. I realized that it didn't make that much money so switched to computers.
And by my school years in the 00's those programs were slashed across the nation thanks to Bush. They just kept putting down the blue collar work and encouraged everyone to go to college. Right as they make student loans unbankruptale.
There’s an argument that treating students as “customers” has led to all kinds of bad outcomes. One example is it creates an incentive to invest in all kinds of fancy infrastructure (fancy halls/dorms and even lazy rivers) because that is how they attract more “customers” but this ultimately becomes a huge driver of educational costs. The same can be said for watered down courses etc.
I would also add, look at the astonishing success (sarcasm), of for-profit colleges. They would have to be considered the extreme of treating students as customers and I don't really know any serious employer who accepts a degree from for-profit colleges. Unless the college is so new the employees hadn't heard of it before and don't know much about it.
