Seems like the country was more competently governed before the current university system, though. If its job is to gate keep incompetence out of leadership it is failing spectacularly.
When you consider the complexification of any single industry over the last 50 to 100 years, then multiply that by every single other industry, then multiply that by the newly complex interactions between industries, then consider that the government must keep some degree of handle on all of that complexity, and consider that they must do it with a smaller headcount per capita (even before Trump) than ever before, against better-funded and more sophisticated "adversaries" (people/orgs trying to evade government management) than ever before ...
It seems very possible to me that the managers of said system are far better than ever before and still fail to produce spectacular results.
> before the current university system,
When was that? Harvard was founded in 1636.