Well, you can't stop offering university degrees; the number of parents who would feel that their child is being denied status would be too large to shoot, even if the world is on fire.
What you can do is three things.
Research Track. There are no grants or scholarships or ANYTHING available for Research Track; if any of your ancestors have ever donated anything to any university you can't get in, and your parents can't give you anything while you're on it. If your marks stay high enough, you stay in on a full-ride system. If you graduate, you graduate with an Academic Degree.
There are explicit quotas for Research Track; it is specifically biased to limit white male involvement to about a quarter. (Which is plenty for the actual aptitudes and low enough to break the existing closed-guild culture in most academic fields.) It is NOT STEM-only. As a government, you provide really vicious feedback mechanisms for differential graduation rates. (You decrease the permissible percentage of administrative budget, some of which manifests as across-the-board salary reductions in progressive-taxation ways (the higher your salary the more you lose), and it lasts and lasts; you need a perfect record for ten years to start seeing increases in the admin budget. You include things like "administrative staff cannot park on campus" alongside the percentage reductions.)
As of $DATE, you can't go to grad school without an Academic undergrad degree OR ten+ years experience and passing an exam. You can't get in from Degree Track anymore.
Degree Track. This is a what we have now. You don't change it much. You're going to work in an office; you have a stamp on your forehead that says "Middle Class". This is what most people sending their kids to university care about.
Skills Track. A long -- ten year or more -- apprenticeship at some material trade. This includes a shedload of field biology and most engineering as well as the kind of toolmaking and millwright work and so on things that come immediately to mind. Also most medical things; emphatically, doctors. There is no reason for MD to be an academic degree and the necessary massive cultural change (so there's none of this "of course you make good decisions after being awake for 24 hours" nonsense) is overdue. You try to chunk this up so that you can do it in pieces; the first three years are EMT things, next three years are nurse things, etc. Or the current technician-to-engineer gradation.
One advantage is that you have to have people skills, too; you're going to be forced to have them because you are going to start off in a group where you have no status. (Unlike the implicit status of med students...) Another is that you put more structure and less opportunity to mess up into the system this way. There are cutouts to go be a tech or an EMT or whatever without having to finish the whole thing. People who get twitchy about "being an engineer" can be focused on the P. Eng. part.
no subject
What you can do is three things.
Research Track. There are no grants or scholarships or ANYTHING available for Research Track; if any of your ancestors have ever donated anything to any university you can't get in, and your parents can't give you anything while you're on it. If your marks stay high enough, you stay in on a full-ride system. If you graduate, you graduate with an Academic Degree.
There are explicit quotas for Research Track; it is specifically biased to limit white male involvement to about a quarter. (Which is plenty for the actual aptitudes and low enough to break the existing closed-guild culture in most academic fields.) It is NOT STEM-only. As a government, you provide really vicious feedback mechanisms for differential graduation rates. (You decrease the permissible percentage of administrative budget, some of which manifests as across-the-board salary reductions in progressive-taxation ways (the higher your salary the more you lose), and it lasts and lasts; you need a perfect record for ten years to start seeing increases in the admin budget. You include things like "administrative staff cannot park on campus" alongside the percentage reductions.)
As of $DATE, you can't go to grad school without an Academic undergrad degree OR ten+ years experience and passing an exam. You can't get in from Degree Track anymore.
Degree Track. This is a what we have now. You don't change it much. You're going to work in an office; you have a stamp on your forehead that says "Middle Class". This is what most people sending their kids to university care about.
Skills Track. A long -- ten year or more -- apprenticeship at some material trade. This includes a shedload of field biology and most engineering as well as the kind of toolmaking and millwright work and so on things that come immediately to mind. Also most medical things; emphatically, doctors. There is no reason for MD to be an academic degree and the necessary massive cultural change (so there's none of this "of course you make good decisions after being awake for 24 hours" nonsense) is overdue. You try to chunk this up so that you can do it in pieces; the first three years are EMT things, next three years are nurse things, etc. Or the current technician-to-engineer gradation.
One advantage is that you have to have people skills, too; you're going to be forced to have them because you are going to start off in a group where you have no status. (Unlike the implicit status of med students...) Another is that you put more structure and less opportunity to mess up into the system this way. There are cutouts to go be a tech or an EMT or whatever without having to finish the whole thing. People who get twitchy about "being an engineer" can be focused on the P. Eng. part.