I read a paper on demographics of WWI casualties–mostly among British officers. At the beginning of the War, a college degree was required for a commission. (As time marched on, other ranks were promoted.)
Young men with less elite degrees, although they may have started with the classics, had often studied things like Engineering. Which qualified them for positions behind the lines.
Oxbridge graduates who had started in the “Public” schools? Send them Up The Line. Where, of course, most of them died…
This pretty much nails it. I would only add that from an aesthetic point of view, literary tastes in this period changed significantly away from classical models and toward more naturalist expression. Vergil was criticized as overly-artificial, Livy and Cicero as too rhetorical.
That isn’t to say these models were rejected wholesale by 20th-century writers. Rather, the original reasons for designating certain writers/works as “classics” had fallen out of favor. IMO–at least for non-specialists–classical works are studied more today for the way they influence or inform modern works (e.g. Ezra Pound reinterpreting the Roman writer Propertius as an imagist poet), rather than as great literature in their own right.
GI Bill. People wanted college to be more than an enrichment experience, they wanted it to be something that would get you ready for the real world. Somethig useful.