While campuses may be fraught with politics, certain quieter trends in academia loom larger than those generating the sound and fury. Subtle procedural shifts give rise to the question: Are universities still agents of higher learning—or are they more like hired hands in a largely ceremonial enterprise? A cynic might wonder if today’s revamped pedagogical imperatives are turning colleges into diploma mills.

At my 1970s alma mater, Brooklyn College, my stuffy cliché of a philosophy professor liked to say that he saw colleges as finishing schools for upstanding, well-informed ladies and gentlemen. It sounded precious even then. Today his vision of graduating polymaths who could hold their own in any conversation seems as dated as the suspenders and bow ties he wore. Colleges are unleashing on society a plethora of young adults who are grievously unfinished.

In terms of broad ambient knowledge, today’s college graduates function roughly at the level of 1950s high-school graduates. A recent American Council of Trustees and Alumni survey found that college students struggle with basic civic knowledge. (Consider the irony of demanding government reform, as campus protesters will, when you don’t even know why the government is set up as it is or how it functions.) One also recalls Harvard’s remedial math coursework for freshmen. Harvard objects to the word “remedial,” but the Crimson says the course is “aimed at rectifying a lack of foundational algebra skills among students.”

How did this happen? While observers of campus sit-ins and disturbances lament that the inmates have taken over the asylum, far more concerning is that the inmates are effectively taking over the program. The powers that be, in their determination to prop up enrollment and retention, have favored students’ curricular preferences to create and sustain a nonthreatening user experience.

Responses in survey after survey suggest that incoming college students seek, above all, actionable learning: a mix of vocational training and up-to-the-minute tech tutelage that keeps them on the cutting edge of the internet, artificial intelligence, etc. They value practical career prep and “hands-on learning” over the kinds of liberal-arts versatility that would have had my old philosophy professor swooning.

The expectations of what students hope college will accomplish for them have turned upside-down in tenor over the past half-century. “Having a meaningful philosophy of life” was a top response in 1967. Today’s goal is to “be well-off financially.” Exit interviews with graduates who found great value in their college educations suggest that they feel that way because their degrees helped them find jobs.

Colleges are listening and adapting. “Meet the students where they are” is a phrase one hears routinely at faculty and planning meetings, even though where the students “are” is functionally illiterate or, more charitably, unprepared for the rigors of traditional college-level work. This growing end-user orientation has resulted not only in an explosion in online coursework—since Zoomers, especially post-Covid, are disinclined to leave their rooms for work or dating—but a progressive loosening in graduation requirements that enables students to complete their degrees with little or no knowledge outside their major.

Colleges mandate fewer general-education courses or required courses that fall outside a student’s chosen area of interest. Moreover, in subjects students are required to take, pressure is strong to grade generously. It would be hyperbole to state that colleges are embracing an “everybody graduates” formula, but movement in that direction is unmistakable.

If colleges are evolving into glorified trade schools, how does one justify the soaring tuition that supports all those professors teaching all those airy disciplines that wouldn’t seem to fit neatly into anyone’s career plans? Shakespeare? Calculus? Queer Studies?

Should education be end-user-driven or should it revert to the top-down model romanticized by my long-ago philosophy professor? Perhaps there is certain knowledge that a university is obligated to impart, whether you want it or not. If you don’t want it, perhaps you’re not college material, as we were once permitted to say without recriminations.

These are complex questions that confound one-size-fits-all answers. But they bear serious thought before that next college application or tuition check is sent out.

Mr. Salerno recently retired as a journalism professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.