I disagree with a lot of what you are saying. I actually think it is very important to be well-rounded individuals and think general electives should be required (even though I absolutely hated them when I was in college). There is a reason why left-leaning people are more likely to have a college education and right-leaning people are less likely to have a college education. It isn’t because people on the left are smart enough to go to college or have the money to, it’s that more move to the left afterwards because going to college teaches you about life outside your small area and teaches you about people who are different from you. The same thing happens in humanities classes, whether you take them at college or not. They broaden your experience outside of just technical stuff. I think that is very important to building a society of people who care about other people and who want to make the world better for others besides themselves.

I also think you have it wrong about “That nonsense came about in the mid-20th century when it seemed industry, automation and electrical gadgetry was going to free us of toil.” Universities were almost COMPLETELY about creating well-rounded people for a thousand years. It is only in the last hundred or so years that college has been about creating a targeted workforce. The first trade school wasn’t “invented” until 1823, and they didn’t become a big thing until after WWII in the 1940s. Universities pumping out engineers became a thing with land-grant schools in the late 1880s. Basically, the industrial revolution in the 1800s shifted college from creating well-rounded people to being focused on careers. “Majors” weren’t invented until 1885 (at Indiana University, which seems weird to me that it was invented there). Before that, you just took a whole bunch of electives based on what you were interested in or whatever your advisor was interested in. In the 1600s when Harvard and Yale were built, they were built for the reason you specifically say came about in the 20th century.

“This was an especially English ideal, realized in the colleges that made up the universities at Oxford and Cambridge. There, students studied, lived, and worshiped in communities with their teachers—and they would do the same at Harvard and Yale. In that way, education became not merely a training of mind or a preparation for profession, but a comprehensive experience meant to develop character, to develop the whole human being in all its dimensions- intellectual, moral, personal.”

It is true that requiring a general education as part of a set curriculum came about in the early-20th century, but that’s only because so many people were only going to college to get professional skills that schools needed to figure out a way to structure and standardized what was never structured or standardized in the past.

I do agree with you that we should make available to anyone at any age humanities classes. And I do agree trade/certification schools are an awesome way to create a better life for yourself or simply to get to do thing you want to do with your life. I also agree that requiring going into massive debt at expensive universities just to get basic jobs needs to die… but I want it to die by having universities be free to attend so anyone can have access to those basic jobs while also having access to a life-broadening experience.