Kinda yes, kinda no.

Education has been under constant evolution since its earlierst forms, though the change over the 20th century (in North America and Western Europe especially) has been profound, particularly in the first half of the 20th century. I'm going to wind back a bit further.

With the founding of the first European universities (1088, University of Bologna), education focused on the seven liberal arts, with degrees generally in administration, law, medicine, and divinity. Early on there was a divide between the liberal arts and the mechanical arts -- what we'd now call "technology" or "engineering", as well as various applied fields -- also known as the vulgar arts. The term doesn't carry the full derogatory sense of today, though these were considered far less honorable and privileged than the liberal arts. Most practical arts were taught within guilds, not at universities.

The liberal arts were divided amongst the trivium (from which: trivial): grammer, logic, and rhetoric, or roughly, input, processing, and output; and the quadrivium: maths, geometry, music, and astronomy, or numbers, numbers in space, numbers in time, and numbers in time and space.

Roll forward to about 1800 and Alexander von Humboldt was reforming the German university system with changes that largely reflect the modern system. The field of "philosophy" had long since been divided into its "natural" and "moral" fields, those were now starting to break out into the physical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy, etc.) and social sciences (over the course of the 19th century): sociology, political science, political economy, psychology, and anthropology. The modern sense of majors was established by the 1880s or so, though it expanded much since then. In the last decades of the 19th century, areas such as English and Literature started becoming formalised as scholarly research rather than technical practice.

Technology was creating demands for specialised technical skills, while the university as a basis for cultural indoctrination was also recognised (John Stuart Mill writes on this at length, Jens Hanson has a good treatment of this).

By 1900, the high school graduation rate in the United States was about 5%. It helped greatly to be white, male, and not working-class. The high-school curriculum itself was comparable to at least the first year or two of a liberal arts college, with math, Latin, Greek, philosophy, literature, and other coursework. The PhD attainment level today is over twice that of high-school graduates in 1900.

Technical schools, of which M.I.T. was not the first but among the most significant, date to roughly 1860. Its course catalogue, to this day, is numbered in the order in which programmes were added to the curriculum, up through the first 12-15 entries, making for an interesting bit of anthropological evidence itself. By the 1920s, the term "publish or perish" was appearing in the context of academic publishing.

World wars 1 & 2 both proved the significance of science and technology, and Vannevar Bush in particular pushed for a vast expansion of higher education and research following his war work, with the launch of Sputnik in 1957 spurred this on. The GI bill accelerated this, and initiatives such as the California Master Plan for Higher Education and others elsewhere (the UK has a similar programme) in the late 1950s and early 1960s lead to a tremendous expansion of universities, along with the Baby Boom and (in the US) draft deferments for the Vietnam War. College enrollments and degree awards boomed. Disciplines within the letters and sciences (modern-day liberal arts) developed increasing degrees of specialisation and in the eyes of many, were increasingly divorced from practical realities. Government funding drove much research, especially in engineering and the sciences, but also in nontechnical fields.

The tide started to roll back in the 1970s with the oil shocks, economic malaise (far more severe in Britain than the US), and other factors, though tuition hikes were fairly modest until the late 1980s / early 1990s. Industry funding replaced some government monies. The glut of 1970s and later PhDs were hitting first slowed growth, then stasis, and finally decline in available academic positions. At the same time, advanced degrees in many areas proved of limited interest in themselves outside academia.

TL;DR: there were significant changes through the 1970s and 1980s, but they are better seen as part of a very large arc of development of higher education.