Colleges explicitly advertise themselves as means of getting training for specialized job markets. They directly partner with companies to provide internships. A college degree is required on the majority of job openings in STEM, regardless of the opening.

This was not a distortion of colleges - it was a full societal push to make colleges more useful to the general public in the 1940s, which directly lead to an explosion in the number of colleges, mostly in the form of community colleges. Since then, the major purpose of colleges has been vocational training first and foremost.