TL;DR: skills vs. reasoning.
For oligarchs, especially of public education, it is a skills-manufacturing pipeline for producing an efficient but docile wage-slave workforce.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery
For themselves, they reserve critical thinking, un-bowdlerized. Yes, an eponym.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bowdler
As Brother Mouzone said in _The Wire_: "You know what the most dangerous thing in America is, right? N-----r with a _library card_."
https://invidio.us/watch?v=bRCyZydgqdc
(Yes, bowdlerized.)
It's the liberal arts vs. the servile arts. "Liberal" because they are liberating, essential to freepersons. It's the undercurrent of virtually all education reform.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_education
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artes_mechanicae
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_reform
Today, higher education is virtiually entirely a credentialing, branding, and gatekeeping mechanism. And like all gatekeepers, the higher-education-industrial complex collects rents.
And this goes back a ways. Hardly the first, but: "On the role of Universities and Primary Education as Social Indoctrination: John Stuart Mill via Hans Jensen", from the 1860s:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6x7u6a/on_the_...
Mind, a college or university experience can be a hugely transformational thing, most especially if the student transgresses the curriculum. In the mid-1980s I shared a campus with some incredibly capable students (several have appeared in HN stories), granted with many who weren't. There were on-campus events, issues, and politics. There were faculty, emeriti, and visiting lecturers who were notable in their fields, including more than a few recognisable names. At least some of whom were patient enough to talk to a clueless undergrad for an hour or so. The arts & lecture series gave access to principle minds and creators. I discovered the on-campus library with a collection in the millions of volumes, part of a multi-campus system numbering in the tens of millions, indexed (though not directly accessible then) via an at-the-time groundbreaking computerised catalogue system -- a preview of DuckDuckGo-like search engines of today. And through the campus computing centre, free use of a shared Unix system, also with multi-campus connectivity, and access not only to such stunning tools as csh, vi, sed, awk, and troff, but email, ftp, and tin.
All of this (and more) has shaped who I am, how I think, and what I value today.
None of this appears in my (mediocre) grades, transcrpts, or degrees. It was a level of access (gatekeepers, remember) largely otherwise impossible at the time. Today's Internet ... makes a significant part of this experience far more generally possible, though there is still a tremendous element of being in the same space with someone, or a group, or access to physical infrastructure, equipment, and environment that online experience can still not match.
And the system in which I'd participated evolved out of a long train of policy decisions, backlashes, many quite political: Thatcher-Reagan conservativism, 1970s eco-awareness and peace movements, 1960s Sputnik-fuelled space-race and nuclear techno-FOMO and -optimism, civil rights, and university expansion, RAND-UCLA Arpanet, 1950s anticommunism, 1940s Vannevar Bush endless frontier government-funded research, early 20th century industrial and energy monopoly funded endowments, late-19th century majors systems, mid-19th century engineering polytechnical schools and land-grant/agricultural policies, the Prussian university model, Enlightenment, the Encyclopaedists, the classical university system, liberal & mechanical arts,the Renaissance and emergence of the university, scholasticism, mediaeval and earlier philosp[hical traditions .... Very little of which I had any knowledge, understanding, or appreciation of at the time.