[shadowerm]

I would say it is an even deeper issue of credentialism vs education.

True education doesn't need busywork but credentialism does. The busywork is the filter for the credential.

Also, if a person doesn't write essays in college how are we going to have all these authors that turn 20 pages of ideas into 300 page books? It would ruin the whole book industry. It takes a ton of practice to uncompress an idea into a coherent structure using 10X more words than needed so the book is the optimal length for sale when printed.