[moonchrome]

I agree that schools are doing a poor job at educating for practical applications but most of that comes from rewarding for satisfying arbitrary metrics and norms that don't really correlate with real world skills. Students being motivated and competing isn't really a bad thing if they were actually learning useful things.

Historically education-performace correlation worked because it turns out that smart kids are generally good at most things so having higher barriers to entry meant higher education was a good filter for general competence and motivation.

Nowadays the "everyone gets to college" system made the filter much less reliable but still left expectations from all those kids that entered college that they will be treated as previously top percentile. Also it decreased the value of college networking as now you're less likely to meet the top percentile students of your generation.

I don't think schools were ever that good at educating for real world but they were a good signal. Leading students to believe that just by imitating the signal will lead to success is bound to leave a lot of kids disappointed.