The 18th century wealthy were burdened with large families whose children mostly lived past puberty (rarely a snag for the peasantry - not the baby-making, the survival). The first male enjoyed primogeniture. Number two was the cadet dispatched to militarily afflict remote swarthy natives. Number three joined the priesthood to bedevil locals. Desperate to thin the crowd at dinner time, parents sent kids off to college to become scholars and perhaps die of a chill.
Colonial Americans discerned European universities were chock full of noble and wealthy families' children. They drew the obvious inference and started local centers of educational stature to create wealth. They had the process backwards, and never did acknowledge their mistake.
Education is a factory eating children and disgorging product - young adults benefiting (Internal Revenue Service) society and occupied by things other than killing each other. To this end product specifications must be established and quality assurance enforced. There must be a market for the goods and it must sustain, lest a successfully crafted slide rule meet a demand for electronic calculators at graduation.
College is simply assayed for excellence: Placement of its graduates and their starting annual incomes. I endure university boasts about football and basketball teams, entering class test scores, and beautiful campuses. NEVER do I encounter any college or university erecting its ivory tower upon a foundation of its graduates being snapped up by employers.
Academia is implied to be at the cutting edge of knowledge. It offers professional savants (having survived tenure appointment) secure careers of thought unencumbered by quarterly profit and loss statements. When industry is desperate for honest mentation it goes to the scholastic font, money in hand. Universities might devote some effort to placing graduates, if for nothing else than to direct serious corporate capital back to alma mater.
Graduate placement is real world nonsense in the short term. Modern business practice has no long term. After graduation, who cares? Graduates are wrung dry by tuition, fees, expenses; predatory housing practices, feral local merchants; and the Financial Aid Department. There is nothing in a graduate that interests his school beyond endowments at death, which are a long way off and massaged by the Alumni Association starting a few years after the sores from four years' attendance heal.
The deepest dung pit on campus is the Placement Center. If any of its personnel were worth spit they would place themselves into better jobs. If they could do it for you they would do it for themselves first. Believe it.
Start contacting every pertinent corporation or other major employer, and NOT Personnel/Human Resources/Human Factors Engineering, the day you enter college. You want personal interaction with management. Make them hungry. Learn how to play a credible round of golf, talk about single malt Scotch, buy a quality wool suit. Education is endeavor forging product to spec for a market. What is your market? What are its annul product demands, its specifications? Who does the buying? What price can you set upon the goods (that's you, buster)?
Gaze upon the college experience. Freshman year is a pile of rubbish whose express purpose is to skin you for credit charges and delete your sorry mind for cause. If you cannot speak, read, and write English and handle math through trigonometry, why are you in higher education at all? Art, history, philosophy, political "science" (as much a science as the "sweet science" of pugilism), psychology... are cultural fetishes. If even one of them had a real hook into either the nature of physical reality or its own flavor of enveloping civilization - were there any real talent or insight - would its instructors be grubbing for pennies and teaching you?
When I attended Michigan State (Moo U) there was a tenured, obese, utterly nutso prof named "Handsome Al Mandelschlecht" by his students. His live lectures were standing room only, as were their video clones all day long. During one lecture, perceiving the kiddies were snoozing, he did a striptease down to his briefs and garters all the while intoning macroeconomic insights. He was hired out by industry at an exorbitant salary. Keeping frosh awake in economics is tantamount to raising the dead. Perhaps somebody hoped he could rouse middle management.
The System's interest in you is circumscribed by cash extraction, juvenile traffic fines to IRS to intensive care rendering the terminally ill like suet. If you are interested in anything but making and keeping money, you are dog meat. Take the hint.