I agree the utopian views are mistaken, but I think a purely dystopian one is mistaken as well. There were certainly plenty of kids just trying to get a job, but the universities also were the source of much of the intellectual development that led to early modern science/math. I recently read a biography of Copernicus, for example, which emphasized the impact on his thinking made by his four years studying at the University of Krakow. Other products of that era's universities included Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, and Leibniz.