[driusan]

For pretty much my whole life universities have been telling people that they need to go to university to get a better job (where "better" == "higher paid", sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly phrased that way.) I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've heard anyone phrase university in terms of civics or pursuing knowledge for the sake of knowledge or anything other than "you need to go to university to get a better job."

This seems to be a case of them getting angry at people for having listened to them. If you tell people that the reason to go to university is to find a higher paying job, it's not their fault if they don't value your university once they find a higher paying job.