But, as you mentioned, you only need a few. The problem is that universities have been expanded from something only for the elite to something for half the pop

But, as you mentioned, you only need a few. The problem is that universities have been expanded from something only for the elite to something for half the population, but they have replicated the structure they had back when they were for the elite. So now we end up with 20x the number of these scholars that we actually need.