“There are students who know what they want to do, have little interest in spending time contemplating the world and can’t wait to get hands on experience in their field.”
There are also students who can contemplate the world, do alot of reading and thinking in high school and outside of the classroom, and still have opportunities to expand on that at large research universities - even ones with a more pre-professional focus like Northeastern (thanks to the 1/3 of grad requirements in various liberal arts subjects). My kid was really looking forward to being able to choose the subjects that really interest him. Some colleges are better at that than others. If he had to slog through 2 years of specific mandatory core courses, he would have hated it. And this is a kid who does well in all subjects - STEM and humanities. But there is no way he’d want to take more bio/chem/physics instead of being able to choose a topic he enjoyed more.