But the whole point is that people are needing university not for specialism but to get their general competency up high enough to be useful. Can you read a text and understand what it says beyond a half-sentence headline? Can you write well enough to convey a thought more complex than "Outgroup bad!"? Can you use numbers to solve problems? Can you understand a concept that is not the most trivial possible, and reason about it in anything but the most trivial way?

Universities, for the time being, still demand this sort of thing in the United States. That you have to rise to these challenges while studying forest science or archaeology or whatever is not a defense of the relevance of forest science or archaeology or whatever for the workplace, but rather that in studying these things students develop their general-purpose skills.

Companies shouldn't be responsible for training this sort of general-purpose talent because if they don't actually need part of it, they won't bother. But society needs it, and the individual needs it to be an attractive hire as opposed to every job requiring previous work experience.

So--fix primary and secondary education. Then re-evaluate, because if we actually fix it, things will look different enough in ways that we can't predict that we probably ought not talk about it too much now.