Universities should be more than toll gates

Makes me think of the "The purpose of a system is what it does" axiom. Universities were always about credentials whether professional or just to indicate social class. They can at the same time be places of learning, and many still are in some disciplines.

The problem is that value of the credential is now worth more (to most people) than the value of the learning/knowledge. So universities adapted to the that model. Its more profitable and university presidents can now earn millions of dollars, further intrenching the problem as it now attracts exactly the kind of people into those positions who only care about money (and themselves).

The true blame for this situation, (IMHO), are the employers across the economy who require applicants have 'university degrees' for jobs that in no way need those skillsets. Bullshit requirements then led to the demand for bullshit degrees which the universities changed to supply.

I agree with your general assessment, but not sure if the blame could be placed on employers mostly/entirely. They're also limited by bounded rationality and cannot (or should not) dictate what the purpose of an education should be. There's such diffusal of accountability that no one is really designing the system, just reacting to it. To your point, the system just do what it does. The ultimate unaccountability machine, per Dan Davies [1].

I think we're witnessing the collapse of the university value proposition. In the decades post WW2, the attendance/competition within universities was quite modest compared to today. Relatively fewer people went, and it was essentially a social class sorter, with a liberal education sprinkled throughout. This actually creates a better learning environment, as once you're "in", you can focus on the experience. Nowadays, the university is just another hamster wheel in the grind, in a never-ending arms race against the sea of other students/degrees/credentials. Failure to deliver results means you didn't consume enough, and must consume more. Eventually this dilutes the value of the degree, both from a signaling and a financial perspective. It seems like we're in the peak enshitification stage of higher ed.

For employers, requiring a degree doesn't cost them anything. So they're happy to keep piling on the requirements. I guess the question is what type of employers would actually be the first to decouple their recruiting/hiring from credentialism and rely on other metrics of competency?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine

You are correct, but the fact that employers are being rational doesn't make them blameless. To answer your question is that I don't see any employers decoupling from credentialism because why would they? So I think any solution to that would require there has to be a cost associated with university requirements for job positions. A fee maybe? Unless the job legally requires the credential (e.g. engineer, lawyer, nurse, etc.), then any other position you have to pay a fee to include that requirement? I know, not great, but what else could be done?

But this is just a tacit admission that a lot of jobs need the credential.

And it's a slippery slope. Should, for instance, a chemist have the credential? It's easy to say, "No". Until you get another Bhopal.

Basically you would start getting more and more fields demanding credentials for liability purposes over time. Some would be entirely justified, like chemist and biologist. Some would be tenuous in the extreme, like c# or javascript monkey.