The problem with this approach is the belief that the university is a place to train undergraduates. Having worked as a staff member, and then jumped to graduat

The problem with this approach is the belief that the university is a place to train undergraduates. Having worked as a staff member, and then jumped to graduate studies, I realized that actually, the modern university is a place of research. The undergraduate bit is simply to pay the bills. The university system's mission to disseminate information to the populace is almost entirely from the research, not the undergraduate teaching. It's not surprising they are inflexible. The reason the UK has more entry methods is because there are far fewer universities than in the US. Having moved to California from the UK when I was 24, CA has far more "universities" that specialize in teaching. The State school and Community College system doesn't exist in the UK... that's why there are all the internships. Finally, the author seems to assign all value in a university from what you learned in lectures. That's a flawed premise: the lectures are there to spur you on to learn outside of contact time. Developing all those skills, meeting all those like minded people, having an ecosystem where you can work on the student newspaper to get more skills... those are things that distributed learning doesn't offer. University != undergraduate lectures.