Change in higher education

A nice article by Daniel Yankelovich in the Chronicle of Higher Education outlines some of the interesting forces at work changing the university in the United States. In particular, his point about the increasingly non-traditional student- the student who combines working and studying over a longer period of time, and who makes life-vocation choices at 30 rather than 20, suggests the increasingly desirability of college as a place of experimentation and methods-learning (learning to learn) rather than place of imparting vocational knowledge... But at the same time, Yankelovich laments the low numbers of engineering graduates... how to reconcile those two?