I have always suspected that Tony Blair's prime motivation in massively expanding the number of young people in tertiary education was to reduce the proportion of the population that was unemployed and that this would be self-funding because students would pay for the experience. As someone who was employed in HE at the time, my perception was that by forcing people to pay for their education they had been changed from students into customers - their expections changed. All too often they wanted to know what occupational utility areas of study possessed.
My approach was to tell them (I worked in a Business School) that it was the employer's job to train them not mine, and that I was providing them with the skills that would be required not in their first job, nor necessarily their next, but the skills they would require when they were responsible for planning, organising and controlling the work of other people - management. I also told them that when they went to do their intercalated year of work experience (the third year of their four-year course) that when they came across occupational practices, which their studies had suggested were best practice, they would hear "We don't do it that way here".
The real purpose of university experience is to acquire the high level intellectual skills whch enable people to become effective strategists and analysts, the skills exemplified at the high levels of Bloom's taxonomy of intellectual skills. Properly constructed, humanity subjects are as capable of developing these skills as are occupational subjects.
It is also worth observing that much of the learning process in subjects like medicine takes place in an environment that is similar to apprenticeship.
