It is most unfortunate that they have gone. The UK has almost wiped out its tertiary education for craft and technician level work, persuing a poorly though through goal of getting huge numbers into university. This goal had more to do with creating a fake reduction in youth unemployment, than any meaningful goal of improving the individuals or the country.
I don't quite agree with that. In my view it was reducing youth unemployment plus academic snobbery, and that appears a sufficient explanation.
I'm not sure academic snobbery is quite the right angle. The big deal to me was that in the 80s, when Japan was doing really well, there was a mantra in the UK that Japan put 18% of its youth through university while the UK only put a few percent through university. This totally ignored what the word university might mean in those countries. It appears Japan put about 18% of its youth through some kind of tertiary education. The UK put about 15% of its youth through some kind of tertiary education, when you include all the day release courses and other non-full time tertiary education. So, the UK wasn't doing as well for its youth, but it wasn't that far away from Japan. The response to the mantra was to turn most of the colleges in the UK into universities. There are now >350 degree awarding places in the UK, which is a pretty big number for a country of <60M people. It leads them to market themselves globally on a growing scale, because they can't maintain good academic standards simply by recruiting more students from UK schools. They would have to accept people with poorer grades in their A levels to do that. You can accept students with better grades if your pool of potential students is expanded. The downside is you can't fail too many people who are paying you lots of money for their courses. Its hard to have solid academic standards when you've become an industry with the motivations that implies.
Since there is still a vast difference between different UK universities and courses, it isn't clear to me how much the technician level work has been removed. I do dislike any merging of doctors with nurses, since they have complementary skills. I do dislike the pushing everybody to be a doctor - since being a paramedic or nurse suits some people better.
I don't understand the use of "still" here. In the 70s there wasn't a massive difference between places tagged university. There was a robust system to prevent the weaker universities awarding watered down degrees. Sure Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, Imperial College, and a few others were more prestigious than the remainder. However, people first asked if you had a 1st or 2nd, and then they asked where you studied. These days the first question is where you studied, and a degree from many places seems barely worth the paper its printed on.
From what I have seen the choices for learning basic craft skills, like construction, have massively contracted. So many of the well run technical colleges that used to run solid craft courses have become universities. Universities don't do craft skills. I don't think anyone is trying to merge doctors with nurses. The only change I've seen is that nurses still study what they always studied, but at the end their academic qualification is now termed a degree.
The key bad result from the current system is the government can't afford to put so many people through 3 or 4 year full time courses, so the cost has been pushed onto students or their families at a time when UK incomes are falling. When 2 or 3% of the people with the best academic results from school, plus a similar number of possibly less able people with plenty of money, went to university in the UK the government could afford the bill. Everyone had their tuition paid, and students from poorer families were given living expenses. People generally walked away from their education without debt, which is a critically important thing for a healthy society.
When I was a kid (1960s) the centre of London was littered with college age backpackers in the summer. I believe most major capitals were the same. Now you don't see many backpackers. People start at university already thinking about how they are going to pay their education debt back. They aren't thinking in broader terms. They aren't trying to do original things. They lack the financial flexibility to be innovative. People are reporting more and more that innovation is slowing. What could possibly be the cause?