Is he wrong? Colleges are an exclusionary filter. I’m not even sure they are even good filters. These days everyone has a degree so it does not mean much to have one. And as for the elite colleges, there are a lot of equivalently capable people who are rejected by them after going through years of performative gestures to build up the right resume. There are also deserving people that are discriminated against in the elite college holistic admission process. These universities are also very expensive for students and for taxpayers.

Most students do not need the university to have expensive professors or expensive administration or research capabilities. They need a place that will teach them in a classroom. And they also need a place that will give them a credential to prove what they learned. It doesn’t matter that random professor is doing random research - it’s some underpaid grad student that is teaching you after all. And these things don’t need to be under one roof.

We badly need alternatives - for colleges and also public schooling in America. I don’t know if this is the solution or one among them, but I would like to see more experimental approaches like it.