When America was founded, universities were basically Bible colleges.
With the enlightenment, came enlightenment values. During this time, study of Greek and Latin were practically standard.
With the coming of industrialization, many adopted the German model of education and became glorified trade schools for the industrial age, churning out classics majors and engineers in equal measure.
Post WW2 with Vannevar Bush's influence, American universities became institutions of research and a crucial part of the military industrial complex.
Finally, with the advent of television, college football became immensely profitable sources of funding for many colleges and universities as well as a huge attraction source for alumni donations.
You say Universities are a clusterfuck, but in reality they have simply evolved with the times, and hence carry a lot of cultural baggage. I don't think that's a bad thing.
It's time to be unburdened by what has been and sharply divide the vocational school and the higher learning/research track like most other first world countries. It's very cruel imo to send mediocre students (who likely won't produce any meaningful research) down research paths while they drown in debt. The state is complicit in this too by guarantee'ing the loans.
And btw, I don't deny that there is value in intermingling vocational studies and cutting edge research - it very much makes sense for some STEM disciplines, but that's the exception not the rule imo.
You think Harvard is a vocational school? Or Columbia, or Stanford, or Princeton for that matter? You think parents like to shell out money presuming their kids are "mediocre"?
The elite schools are still elite schools. They just do cutting edge research now... research originally intended to win a thermonuclear WW3. Their humanities departments of these schools may very well still also stuffed with academics influenced by Soviet active-measures campaigns from the cold-war which actively seek to undermine the power of American institutions to win that long settled conflict.
The agricultural colleges of the 19th century now do research and have football teams now.
American Universities are incredible powerhouses of research. The impact of research efficacy is power law distributed, just like youtube influences, and American wealth. A lot of people in the tech industry seem to be jaded by Universities due to the fact that they've gotten outrageously expensive compared to the median income, that for the past 15 years you can make easier money doing webservices than Greek literature, and the majority of universities are not Harvard or MIT. But you can't deny the enormous contributions to society from American universities. Many people we hold in high regard started off as "mediocre" students.
And the truth is there are many colleges and universities in America that are vocational schools. They just don't want to admit it. How many community colleges in the states are really preparing kids to become nobel laureates? The anti-university sentiment is just another offshoot of the anti-elitism (and perhaps anti-intellectualism) running through American society today... a natural consequence of the situation where you have massively skewed wealth distribution and massively skewed success outcomes from that power law distribution I mentioned earlier.
You're definitely misreading what I wrote, and by the way, given that America has had first pick for the smartest people across the entire world for 100 years, the baseline is much higher than, produces a lot of good research (there has never been a higher IQ gravity well in history). The goal here is to produce amazing research without crippling the middle class with debt and wasting their time so that we have a functioning society that also advances.
Something extremely simple like a 1300-1400 SAT cutoff for university will get us half way there. University being an institution that qualifies for large research grants.
Wealthy parents often hire tutors and consultants to guarantee that their intellectually mediocre children get into those élite schools.
Universities are the epitome of institutional inertia. That is a bad thing.