As for not having breadth. While I agree having breadth is important, knowing little about a lot isnt generally regarded as constructive and often leaves people ill informed and unable to defend their various beliefs and ideologies. That's why there has been a shift towards more specific education.
Making sure you gather more knowledge outside your field on your own volition is incredibly important, but pursing a specialized career, in which you are very knowledgeable in your field is equally critical.
I know what you mean, if you're thinking of the kinds of 70s/80s general humanities majors who were ill-equipped for "career employment", back in those Cold War glory days when university education was cheap and universal and in practice nothing more than a time-biding next educational phase after high school, just the thing for hippies and slackers to infinitely defer real adult responsibility by.
However, the kind of "breadth" I'm referring to isn't about formal education per se, but something more passively acquired through everyday media exposure back when a "valid" mass media still existed. Whereas these days, kids generally don't grow up in households with newspaper subscriptions or much in the way of print media around the house, so there's little tangible to draw attention and whet curiosity. Sure, a lot of that exists on the internet; but one has to actively motivate them into taking advantage of that plethora.
But speaking of someone that's old enough to be the parent of such kids, another thing comes to mind relative to my own youth: that the nature of parenting has changed. Or to put it another way, I was part of the first cohort who grew up in an era when, thanks to the sexual and social and cultural revolutions of the 60s and 70s, parenting came to be more of an "opt-in" than a natural, universal rite of passage. Thus entering a phase of life when, back in the immediate postwar years, people my age typically started to marry and reproduce, I felt a disconnect. In fact, in the high Reagan years, it seemed to me like those who *did* opt in--not just re parenting, but the whole suburban-nuclear-family lifestyle--were like the hidebound dregs of whatever generation they belonged to.
And in retrospect, I might have been intuitively on to something--that is, by the 80s/90s, those whom one might term "culturally thoughtful" were having a lot less children, or being very measured in *how* they had and raised children. They became rarefied cases, even if they became a critical mass in "hipstervilles". While those who *were* having children in spades sort of like...shouldn't have been having children? Or at least aside from religious/natalist obligations, the brats worked out as little more than protoplasmic bling, self-indulgent emblems of fertility and fecundity
So my feeling is: a lot of these Trumpish kids likely come from the kinds of so-called dreg families I was distancing myself from from the 1980s onward, and they internalized the kind of tabloid/reality-show/Instagram values that prevail among such types. And because they come from such a culturally bereft environment and know no better, even the best university education for them might work out as nothing more than "DeVry with pretensions"...
