[rjprins]

What the article misses, but what I think is going on is that education is a lot like health care:

The need is very high (everybody wants to get a good job!), while supply is limited to established institutions.

Partly because it's so hard to prove to the world that your education program is excellent, it's very difficult to disrupt the market. Also, having money correlates with success later. Only well off people can pay for the best universities, but the best universities produce the best students partly because those students were well off in the first place.