This seems like such an old train of thought. There are full lecture series available from a large number of prestigious lecturers at highly accredited universi

This seems like such an old train of thought. There are full lecture series available from a large number of prestigious lecturers at highly accredited universities. There are thousands of creators/hackers/researchers that have spun up every manifestation of creation you can think of and many of them publish the how-to in the process. You can get digital copies of textbooks, there's a whole open source encyclopedia which is competitive with proprietary encyclopedias. All the knowledge has been democratized. Causing a recession of the institutions at this point would be progressive. By all means I think the most progressive thing would be a move back to the apprenticeships of yore, even in STEM. A lot of people are going into specialist fields anyways, you may as well learn to make bespoke rats from somebody that's been doing it their whole career, nobody needs all the tangential shit when there's a straight, well-trodden road to the end product. We need to loose the grip of these institutions on our economy, they're - very evidently - a trillion dollar sink.