[bokonist]

"College is about protecting the young from an unforgiving society...Traditionally, college was to protect young men from the horrors that society inflicts upon men of low status,... It protects the students, and it protects the market from their wage depression, and it protects society from a deluge of unemployed people..."

I am not aware of any evidence that these motivations were the conscious intent behind the creation of the post-World War II university complex (except to the extent that avoiding mass post-war unemployment was a motivation for the GI bill in particular). Nor does it seem like it was the subconscious or institutional intent either. Do you have any evidence for these statements?

In my understanding, the post-war college system was created because the nation's leadership believed in the goals of training people for the workforce and the Utopian goal of educating every person as a philosophe. The people in charge of the system at the time were academics themselves, who were true believers. As the university industry grew, there is a big incentive to cater to the whims of the students in order to attract students, so universities have made themselves a very pleasant and sheltered playground for 18-22 year olds.

The subconcious, adaptive motivation for the creation of the university system, is that the idea of a university education is a self-replicating adaptive fiction. Whether or not the education is useful, the more people who have the education, the more people who are indoctrinated to believe that said education is useful, so the more the belief replicates.