I have to laugh when someone refers to 100+ years ago as “very recently.”
Considering many modern European universities date back as far back as the 9th century and the oldest US university to 1636, 100 years ago is “very recent” indeed. 
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article121550657.html
More on the trends.
He is a free adult in society and can make his own decisions. He if wants to move to a third world country and live in a cave, he can.
I’m afraid it will take more than classes on “marriage” and “how to do your taxes” to be able to send humans to other planets.
Yeah like French, European History, that will get man to Mars.
Not all humans are going to contribute to space exploration, that those that will,
are free to go to an engineering college that focuses on STEM (with minimal BS
classes, at some more colleges more than others).
But general college education is not preparing man to go to Mars.
But it does prepare many to work at McDonalds.
I’d say good luck to the student. One day he might be successful. A guy named Rush went to a smaller school in the neighboring state of Missouri, dropped out, and became very successful later on. I first listened to his radio show 25 years ago and learned the word “dittohead”. I assume he’s still hosting the show today. I googled a couple of other talking heads and found similar stories. American dream.
It’s very ironic you said that considering General Douglas MacArthur during his stint as West Point Superintendent not too long after WWI mandated an increase in liberal arts in the curriculum.
Especially in Foreign Languages/lit, history, political science, etc because he found from his firsthand observations that the extreme STEM-centered curriculum which existed at West Point before FAILED to prepare many of its graduates with the necessary background knowledge/skills necessary for occupational/military government administration duties in Germany after its defeat in WWI.
West Point is a specialized school, not a traditional university.
As you say, they are preparing people to occupy another nation 
Most schools do not have such a goal.
And note most int he military during WW2 were drafted, with no college before
the war. He is talking about the elite commanders in the military, not the average person.
My point is that education should be flexible to produce many different kinds of persons
with different skills and viewpoints. We don’t all need to have the exact same core curriculum.
We just need a distribution of skills in society.
Clearly dropping out of college can be a disadvantage :
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/pay-gap-college-grads-record-44731539
but
Surely foreign languages are immensely practical, especially in business. I can’t imagine an American businessperson not gaining benefit from being fluent in Spanish or Chinese.
I work at NASA and with all our foreign partners we have to teach engineers Russian. To learn it having other foreign languages in college would sure help. We also work with other European nations and foreign language is a plus!
Not necessarily to occupy another nation. But like West Point, most colleges/universities…especially the respectable/elite ones DO have training future leaders as a part of their stated mission.
One thing about leadership education which has long persisted in many cultures…including the US culture in particular is that one needs to have an expansive horizon broadening education from elementary school through undergrad at the very least to be considered a well-educated higher-level leader. .
Someone who is overly specialized in a vocational area may be considered by many as a good leader in that narrow area, but not considered a viable candidate by many for leadership roles beyond that.
This extends even into some areas of the US military such as how the US Navy divided its officer tracks so only unrestricted line officers got promoted to the highest leadership positions whereas more specialized officers such as Engineering Officers were much more restricted to leadership service in their specialized area rather than the Naval service.
Also, West Point and other Service Academies with the possible exception of USMMA have become traditional colleges/universities due in part to General MacArthur’s reform efforts to
broaden the curriculum as WP superintendent after WWI.
Incidentally, the US along with France were the innovators in starting the trend of requiring its academy trained officers to have a college-level technical and non-technical university-level education.
The rest of the world didn’t follow suit for more than a century.
Incidentally, the UK still officially doesn’t require its academy trained military officers to be university graduates and there are always a few incoming Sandhurst graduates who are fresh out of A-Levels or equivalent with Prince Harry being the most prominent, but not an isolated case.
And in the past and even nowadays in many other countries, there is the educational flexibility you are calling for. Especially considering in many of those countries and the US in the past, most who view education as vocational training have and do pursue the option of vocational high schools, higher vocational institutes, and apprenticeships in lieu of going the college/university.
Actually, he flunked out of college after 2 semesters and a summer according to his own mother and a publicized college transcript I recalled reviewing in a dead-tree article a decade and half ago.
Among the classes flunked was ballroom dancing…a class I also came close to flunking in HS if I had dipped my partner’s head 5 more inches into a nearby wall I had been oblivious to until the instructor noticed and yelled at me.