Yes, my grandparents and to some extent my parents moved in an entirely different educational model, which look like "no university qualifications". My mother was an RN, my father had a ship's officer ticket, one grandfather was an aircraft tech and later computer programmer, one was a radio signalman and later a professional writer and poet, one of my grandmother's knew much of Shakespeare by heart, the other was a union leader after she went back to work when her kids, born in her late teens, were grown.
And especially among my grandparents, they were far more literate than most of their grandchildren with university degrees are today - my grandmother read Homer in school, even though she left to work at 15, most of her grand-kids only have a vague notion who he was.
One thing that keeps coming to my mind about this university qualification thing is a study done in the US, where they found that actually, the reasons for the opinions of university grads were really no better founded than those of anyone else. The big difference was they were able to justify them more effectively. That is, they fell into the trap the wise always warn about with education - using it to simply justify your already formed opinions. And worse, they fall for their own justifications.
In any case, many universities today completely fail to incalculable any real ability to process complex though, and instead seem to be almost anti-intellectual.