It's certainly reasonable to expect colleges to be 'trade schools' for many skilled trades, traditionally that was the main purpose of universities. A tradition

It's certainly reasonable to expect colleges to be 'trade schools' for many skilled trades, traditionally that was the main purpose of universities. A traditional classical university has/had four faculties - medicine, law, theology and philosophy (some centuries later separated in many subfields from natural science to humanities), and the first three of them quite explicitly were there to prepare "skilled tradesmen" to work as doctors, lawyers and clergy. Afterwards in the industrial age many other colleges and academies were explicitly formed to prepare various disciplines of engineers that the growing industry needed, again, the primary focus being skilled workers not science. Of course, there is a place for liberal arts colleges and research-focused universities, but that's far from being the only role of universities; and IMHO our society needs a dozen software engineers for each computer scientist, so universities can't focus only on the latter.