University is easy because it's been used as a social partitioning system; there are a whole raft of jobs where you have to have a degree.
(Interestingly, there are some trades -- for example, that of electrical lineman where there's a specific employment distinction between third and fourth year apprentices! -- that have got much, much tougher than they were.)
The fix isn't the university standards in isolation; the fix is making most jobs unavailable to degree credentials. (Which actually means, given all the stuff on walls, creating a new set of academic credentials.) That lets you have academic universities, chiefly concerned with unscrewing the inscrutable, and the job credentials most people want. (It would help to create a lot more academic-adjacent jobs in a broad range of research topics.)
no subject
(Interestingly, there are some trades -- for example, that of electrical lineman where there's a specific employment distinction between third and fourth year apprentices! -- that have got much, much tougher than they were.)
The fix isn't the university standards in isolation; the fix is making most jobs unavailable to degree credentials. (Which actually means, given all the stuff on walls, creating a new set of academic credentials.) That lets you have academic universities, chiefly concerned with unscrewing the inscrutable, and the job credentials most people want. (It would help to create a lot more academic-adjacent jobs in a broad range of research topics.)