At least part of the story is told through the answer and follow-up in this thread on brutalist architecture.

Although the initial question is specifically concerned with public housing, the answer connects that to the wider trend in brutalism in Europe and America.

Preservationists sometimes refer to "30-year disease," the tendency of our society to reject as ugly every style as it reaches the 30-year mark. If the buildings survive until they're 50 years old, suddenly they're rediscovered as wonderful examples of a particular period that now has a name, with books and magazine articles and Pinterest pages devoted to it. We saw it in the 1970s with what's now called Art Deco, we saw it a decade ago with Mid-Century Modernism. Postmodernism of the 1980s is just now coming down with the disease. Brutalism is a pretty specific movement and style having to do with the plasticity and novelty of unfinished concrete (beton brut)—not just a catchall for "ugly things from the 1970s—and it's a style that isn't easily appreciated by many laymen. Nonetheless, preservationists have fought for and won battles to save some notable Brutalist buildings.

Architecture, of course, is not a pure art; it's a craft that ultimately has to produce useful objects. In the case of college dorms, it was often the case that ones built in the 1950s were built in a traditional manner, as buildings had been built for centuries, and so they're often cost-effective to bring up to date with new mechanical and electrical systems. Buildings of the 1970s, by contrast, were often built with new technologies such as poured-in-place concrete that was left unfinished both inside and out, room partitions that are part of the structure, and small inoperable windows as a result of the Energy Crisis. Often it's just cheaper to tear them down and start over—and because they're also considered ugly by most people, no one fights to save them.

I went to a public California university with a fair bit of brutalist architecture, and the talk among the students was that the architecture aided in crowd control and preventing large scale student protests (smaller windows, easier to control flow of foot traffic, etc)

Is there anything to that?

I think this is a global problem not just one restricted to the USA. It's mainly connected to the demise in Classical education combined with huge population, technological and economic growth, which meant a whole generation of postwar architects grew up consciously aware that they were pioneers of a new era (postmodernism) that needed to create whole new cities cheaply and in a short space of time and which had little inclination or possibility of following in the footsteps of their predecessors, many of whom had either died in the war or came from a time before the new materials and tech was available or just represented an era of Gothic Revival and Classicism which were seen as tainted respectively by Nationalism and Imperialism which had led to two world wars, and were thus discredited.

Communism and other ideologies which urged a wholesale reorganisation of society from the bottom up were the order of the day. And with these new ideologies came a building style which was consciously bare, undecorated, utilitarian, and not built according to any classical conceptions of beauty. In addition of course there was a huge growth in the use of cheap artificial materials at that time which were needed to build quickly and which were also embraced for their obvious aesthetic attraction in terms of breaking from the past.

As to whether the architecture itself was terrible, that's a matter of taste. A lot of today's architects actually love Brutalist architecture and our new glass and steel form of archtecture, whilst it may be a rejection of the dark, brooding and closed concrete in terms of its openness and transparency, is still pretty close to it. If things have improved now it's because we're gradually learning the lessons of using overly cheap materials and building too fast and have started using slightly more hardy materials with an eye to more practical and less ideologically motivated buildings and spaces.

Are you more curious about the style (brutalist architecture) or the construction?

For the latter, especially in Florida but with effects nationwide, the answer comes down in good part to 1992's Hurricane Andrew. The HistoryMiami museum recently had an exhibition on Hurricane Andrew which touched on how it altered building codes and set a new standard for safe construction.

Codes, zoning and bad inspection practices were blamed for a lot of the devastation following what was, at the time, America's most expensive storm. Check out Miami Herald's Pulitzer Prize citation: "For coverage that not only helped readers cope with Hurricane Andrew's devastation but also showed how lax zoning, inspection and building codes had contributed to the destruction."

(For the former, which is outside my expertise, I'd still recommend Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House. It isn't a scholarly work but starts out with basically the same question as yours, and is a fun read.)