The current university system (I can only speak to US here) was made post-WW2 to produce employees for office work in large corporate bureaucracies. The degree

The current university system (I can only speak to US here) was made post-WW2 to produce employees for office work in large corporate bureaucracies. The degree insured that you could show up on a regular basis, go where you're told, learn how to perform arbitrary tasks whether you thought they were necessary or not, and communicate effectively about this. They also provided, at the larger universities especially, a lot of training in how to deal with a bureaucracy. All of this was absolutely relevant in 1950 for working at a large corporation, in a white-collar job. The more recent job market doesn't look much like this, but then good training for the current job market would probably not call for an institution that looks much like a university. It would probably call for something more like trade schools and apprenticeships, with guilds to protect the apprentices from poor treatment (something that, for example, Ph.D. students are sorely lacking). It seems unlikely that universities can adapt to a situation that primarily requires that they go away or at least become much smaller, to be replaced by a different system.