You got trained while you worked because most people stayed at the same company from the day they started until the day they retired. So it was easy for companies to justify investing time and money into training: barring unusual circumstances, they expected that person to remain an employee for a long time.
Nowadays though, job-hopping is the norm. If the company cannot expect you to stay for longer than X years, they're going to adjust their hiring practices to make sure new hires are "safe", i.e. have degrees from prestigious colleges. Of course that still doesn't guarantee they will have the necessary skills from the get-go, but if things don't work out the hiring manager can at least cover his/her own ass by saying, "well, he/she was a <prestigious college> graduate..."
When I tried an Ed-tech startup in college, our biggest barrier was that nobody wanted to sign off on an untested product in case it went wrong and they got the blame.
There's a lot wrong with going deeply into debt to study the humanities, though - especially when you wind up surprised that you can't make enough of a living to pay off your loans.
Four comments upthread from this one, eastbayjake said, "(2) Everyone can benefit from learning new things -- even (or perhaps especially) a liberal arts education -- but many students are attending college to get a credential and land a good job." Your reply to that comment triggered my comment.
Maybe I've had enough humanities to know to look at surrounding context ;-)
If all you learn is history and literature and nothing about how the world around you works - aka science and math - your deficiencies are just in other areas.
If something is "well rounded," it has shape in all directions.
World War 1 would not have been the same without machine guns and chemical weapons. How was it that these manufacturing processes scaled up to meet the needs of major national warfare? What was it about mustard gas that made it such an effective tool? Why was it not used more widely? Why was it used just as much as it was? Why use that and not a different kind of gas? How did they acquire the resources for, process, and send this deadly substance miles and miles to the front lines where it could be used without erupting and killing one's own troops?
To truly understand these kinds of questions, a scholar must take into account the entire scope of history, not just the narrative. History is everything.
Time was you'd go to college, get a job, and get trained while you work. Of course I'm not saying a rocket scientist opening should cater equally to the engineer and the artist, but we have become so addicted to pedigree that we forget how differently things can be done when we don't expect a new CS graduate to build a mobile API on their first day.