I sympathize, but if your students stop focusing on that, how do you propose they pay rent after graduation? Working retail? Bartending? Commuting ten hours a week to adjunct at three local community colleges? None of those options exactly leave a lot of time or energy for fundamental research

You can't just handwaive or long-sigh this away...you have to have concrete, realistic, and actionable answers to these questions....otherwise you are literally just complaining about children wanting to survive