I enjoyed the way you phrased this. At times I've felt like different aspects of the "college experience" would be a scam if there weren't so many disparate good-intentions.
> They care about signaling
Non-traditional students in my university used to qualify for free tutoring by specific university-approved tutors. This semester, it was deemed an inappropriate use of resources and the funding was instead redirected to hire an administrator to write a regular newsletter "designed for the nontraditional undergraduate community" to "provide more opportunities to enhance and enrich your student experience".
That's quite an ambitious goal for what I would term marketing. If there is in fact anything resembling a unified-mission at this time, it certainly does not include reducing friction of at-risk students from graduating.
The example I turn to -- and I'd be interested in the hard data on this -- is the explosion of STEM education in the US after WWII. It seems to me that a massive institution of STEM education was built on the idea that we needed to "beat the soviets" in the tech race. Ample public funding made tuition cheap and expanded opportunities for huge swaths of the population. But access to these institutions is being shut out by increasing costs. Students pay a fortune in tuition and housing, and yet every intro science and technology class doesn't have enough seats.
I think it's a subtle change that has occurred. The universities don't much care about providing the best possible education. They care about signaling to the market that their graduates are the best, so that graduates can pay their loans back. This is because there is no unified mission any more. We're not engaged in a technological race with anyone, so the institutions only need to perpetuate the signal of quality--not quality itself--to maintain their existence.
We're resting on the inertia, which is slowly waning until we are not the best in the world any more. At that point, the true magnitude of the deficit will become apparent, because immigrants will look elsewhere to be educated.
The institutions that are really picking up the slack here are community colleges. Their resources are dwarfed by the scope of their mission.