[Synthetase]

I think I might have some perspective to comment on education. I dropped out of a large public institution in a technical program to work in industry for a while. Many of my motivations were similar to the authors complaints.

Is education a scam? I think it is what you make it out to be. If you major in Communications and spend all night fratting it up, then yes you could have a case that education was not useful to you. Even then you are deriving utility because you are practicing your people skills and creating a network useful in your future career.

I don't find his complaints about scut work particularly compelling. It happens in industry. Get used to it and stop whining.

I think that the biggest problem nowadays is that we immediately push students to college right after high school. For a subset of highly motivated students, this is the right move and they often thrive in college. I do think the majority could benefit from a year or two to find themselves. A semi-mandatory national service program might be a great idea since it would carve out a time for this express purpose. Students would no longer feel they were behind if they did not immediately enter college. The time spent in college would also be spent more productively.

Ultimately I plan on going back to school. I think there are something like six genealogical hops between Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mills. For better or worse, the most brillant minds who produce the ideas which civilization are based around or usually found in universities. One simply cannot get that kind of personal mental exposure to them in industry.