I think the more plausible explanation is that universities have marketed themselves for two generations as worth attending because “you will get a better job and earn more money than if you don’t have a degree.” That’s the main reason why far too many members of each high school cohort attend college.
Then, in the last 20 years or so, in order to compete in marketing against each other, colleges have ratched up the peripherals: pretty campus, nice dorms, gourmet food, “college” atmosphere, superior coddling of first-year students (a big seller among helicopter parents) and so forth. So they go to college for the “college experience” and colleges bend over backwards to give it to them in a way that they hope will set them apart from their competitors.
Faculty are expressly told not to get in the way of this marketing work. Demanding too much of students, thinking that it’s all about intellectual curiosity or reading the world’s great minds or reading anything at all (it’s all about gadgets and the classroom-as-variety-show-atmosphere; the teacher’s fundamental job is to keep them entertained; the students’ primary complaint on teacher evaluations is “she’s boring”)—all these are forbidden.
We are teaching at a high school level for most students. Honors programs are the islands where something like what would have qualified as higher education forty years ago still goes on. Maybe.
Colleges have brought this on themselves by turning to a business/marketing model. Faculty lost governance years ago; policies are set by people with graduate degrees in University Administration who by definition don’t know what it’s like to be scholars, only what it’s like to administer and market products.
Parents who care about education need to send their children to the new start-up colleges (I’m familiar largely with the new Catholic start-ups—Thomas Aquinas College in California, Wyoming Catholic, Christendom in Virginia, St. Thomas More in New Hampshire—and some reverts—Belmont Abbey College, Assumption College, Benedictine in Kansas etc. I’m not sure there’s much of the same sort of thing going on either in the secular or Evangelical Protestant worlds—Patrick Henry College would be the exception, I suppose.)
“you will get a better job and earn more money than if you don’t have a degree.” That’s the main reason why far too many members of each high school cohort attend college.
That phrase was drilled into my head by every member of my family while I attended high school.
I discovered a little later that it is not WHAT you know but WHO you know that gets you that better job with better pay.
College is just a four year escape from reality to for many(not all) people.
Much of the accurate, disastrous turn to higher education that you describe can be attributed to our national government’s funding of student loans and grants.
Parents now take their children from college to college, watching for what package of dorms and dining halls, athletic and other extra-curricular facilities will grab their offspring’s interest. Only tangentially does cost enter into the equation.
There was a time in our nation's history where a high school graduate was well balanced in his education. He was, indeed, qualified to enter the job market in any number of fields.
Today, many of our factories are gone. They were the source of labor, machinist, chemist, marketing, clerical, etc. jobs. So what's left?
Teachers, diplomats, police, fire, ecological, forestry, and a few others like restaurant management (flipping burgers). In respect to worthwhile occupations like mechanical engineer, tool and die engineers and makers, et al, they're gone forever until we can change the definition of forever.
Perhaps I'm fortunate as my college days were completed before America began going out of business.
But then there's still my adult children and my grandchildren.
You might want to add Hillsdale and Thunderbird if the student has the grades and aptitude.
http://www.hillsdale.edu/
http://www.thunderbird.edu/