True, but way back when most universities started out as a place for preparing its students to enter the pastoral field. What a long long way off the mark those same institutions have gone!
Those who founded our state operated institutions of learning overwhelmed the field a couple of centuries after those first universities were established. Happened around the time we imported the "Ph D" from Germany. Germany was the only place in the world that had the Ph D, so intellectuals from America had to go there to get one.
What had begun with the "French" Enlightenment had morphed into the collectivism of socialism & communism. Continental Europe was a hotbed of revolution, with the "intellectual class" leading the charge. Course that was attractive to our homegrown intellectuals, cuz it made them the top dogs. In Europe, it was the intellectual elite class against the old guard elite & both believed they had the right to rule the masses.
We didn't have any real old guard elite defending hereditary power, so revolution wasn't necessary here. All that was needed was the power to shape the minds of the masses to follow the intellectual elites... Faith in Almighty God was the big stumbling block to that & keep in mind, religion in the US was a choice, not a state mandate. We were a nation spawned by true believers. It bubbles up from the bottom instead of being dictated from the top down, which makes us naturally less collectivist than most Europeans.
Anyway, our newly minted Ph D's came back & set up programs in the US so future generations of American intellectuals could earn them here. They were joined by a bunch of "forty-eighters" who also went into the area of education after they got here. They began to remake our entire education system, top to bottom.