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...but two big ones are that universities have no control over whether or not students learn, or whether employers choose to hire them one way or the other. Anyone who has ever taught university classes knows than learning is a student choice-- we can't unzip students' heads and pour knowledge into them. Students have to choose to do the actual hard work of learning a lot about many things in a short time. It's a challenge they have to respond to. All the university can do is provide them with opportunities to learn. What students do with those opportunities is entirely up to them.

Employers, on the other hand, are under significant pressure that's completely independent from considerations of academic success (or university prestige) to hire workers at the lowest possible salary. They will happily underpay any workers they can, and in today's college graduate job market the graduates are usually at a disadvantage that's driven by market forces, not applicants' academic qualifications. Our capitalist system provides strong incentives to decouple earnings from academic achievement to the greatest possible extent.

I think this is all just part of our current American anti-intellectualism, especially strong on the political right. Shit on universities because, you know, educated "elites."