>Everyone else sits at home and just learns the stuff and does the exams while driving an uber. It will take a lot less time to just jump the math hoops than to do four years of half holidays, eg my total university time was actually 96 weeks but spread over 4 years. So a couple of years of doing that and people can see you can learn stuff.
All that does is test whether you know the content, which you said yourself "doesn't teach you anything you need to know at a job". It doesn't tell the employer whether you can handle 4 years of assignments and showing up labs/tutorials. I suppose you could add those back, but then we're back to square one when it comes to the university experience.
It just needs to be done cheaper, in a way that doesn't waste so much time. Why make people do 4 years of slogging through umpteen courses when you can just do a few, and let that be your evidence they can do it?
In the end there's just no way a course in some science can substitute for a job in business, so if you're going to use a course as your hurdle, why not just do a short one?
You could also just say we'll have fewer students. That way businesses will have to choose between high school grads. But as it is now, very few people will want to be that guy who doesn't have a degree.
All that does is test whether you know the content, which you said yourself "doesn't teach you anything you need to know at a job". It doesn't tell the employer whether you can handle 4 years of assignments and showing up labs/tutorials. I suppose you could add those back, but then we're back to square one when it comes to the university experience.