There's a difference between a vocational school, and a university program which teaches vocationally relevant skills. Many land-grant universities especially, were explicitly founded to teach practical, technical, economically relevant skills in the context of a broader liberal arts.

In that context, it's not surprising that many public universities do see post-college employment metrics (employment rate, median salaries) as an extremely important measuring stick of success. Many of these programs do make efforts to include vocationally-applicable education in the core curriculum, because it helps to keep those numbers up.