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I haven't read the book, but have often heard that trope - did he write about actual research into the topic?

I ask because in the fields I'm familiar with many innovative approaches are actually university spin-offs.

Edit: The point of this beautiful article, "a society that is blind to the potential of so many of its young people, is a wasteful, unfair and ineffective society" is a sad truth, but in my opinion the answer is openening the institution up, not abolishing it. Those people didn't learn middle class behaviour in universities, they were socialized with it since birth. Good, widely available public education is an effective means to level out this class-based inequality.

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Same. The yearly local value added from eship alone at the university I work at is in the 200-300M+ USD/CHF range. The global value added is significantly higher.

I imagine that technical universities, like ETHZ/EPFL, have a much larger annual impact