100 years ago, learning Greek and/or Latin was a large part of all there was to study. Now we have multitudes of fields and subfields regularly generating actual demonstrable progress in the capabilities of humanity, few of which require knowing anything about Thermistocles.

Knowledge has gotten so complex and siloed that one of the most useful things for the inter-disciplinary academic project I observed turned out to be a facilitator with no subject-area expertise in any of the fields, who undertook the task of building glossaries to translate jargon and storyboard concepts people in different departments were trying to explain past each other.

The chain of conceptual courses necessary to reach a level where one understands papers that have recently been published advancing a particular subfield, has grown longer and longer in STEM. At some point, your program decided to compromise on the things that weren't necessary to reach the advanced levels, so that they had room to get people there at all during their undergrad. There are fields and universities where this isn't the case, where an undergrad only qualifies you to take a master's degree. Some revision of the standard unit of 'the four-year degree' is probably a reasonable thing to examine at this point.