"Selling indulgence" is a bit of gross generalisation though. Getting a medicine or technical degree from a top-tier university does prepare you technically for a very technically demanding job. Whatever replacement you imagine for this phase of such occupations will end up reinventing something very similar to university. Do you imagine people should jump straight into these occupations without undergoing some kind of training/testing that they reached a certain level of technical understanding of their occupation?

The problem is that many universities have accreted huge management layers and some non-sensical degrees but this is not unique to universities.

I’m not really beating around the bush. A university cannot normalize the prices of all of their majors around outlier majors that have more market demand. They cannot also bundle a “premium” package of the college experience (which evidently now involves indentured servitude, which I’m guessing comes after premium room and board pricing?). Check the whole bill, everything is out of whack.

Drop the prices of 90% of majors, that one should be obvious.

Sharing the wealth should be obvious too, but that one isn’t either apparently. So they overcharge, and then don’t pay their own.

It’s massive pricing issue mired in severe levels of piety and self importance. No one wants to replace universities, they want them to stop scamming.