This point is moot. You can think that if you want but it solves in no way the problems as described by OP. In the article, you can basically replace university

This point is moot. You can think that if you want but it solves in no way the problems as described by OP. In the article, you can basically replace university with school and get the same result (perhaps at a very slightly lower level of gravity). I'm french and just went through education, the situation here is structurally the same. Buildings and furniture is shit; teacher are underpaid and overworked; tons are outright bad (missing field knowledge, missing child psychology understanding, missing basic philosophical concepts about school mission); lower management is under stress and career-oriented, higher management is short-term political and incompetent in the field, in the middle they are borderline corrupted / have mafia-like structure. This whole situation is generalized (one can even look at other public services like health or libraries which are very much taking the same path). So would you say less people should go to high-school? Or less to elementary school? Where do we stop? Nope, imho it's pretty clear that there's an elephant in the room: public services are better run with long term stable funding (no need for tons, just what's needed) and completely independently of whatever the short term economic market incentives are. Some sprinkle of oversight from generalists and politics is good, but ffs let the people that actually do the thing decide the shape of it. I'm not telling bankers whom they should lend to. (But that's just my extremist pov /s). ps: just to be clear, the actual acceptable part of your opinion is even acknowledged in the article, in the start of paragraph "We’re going to regret it." tldr: the current university focused on abstraction/math/erudition is stupid anyways. Yes it should go away (as a mainstream thing).