There is a fair bit to unpack here, so lets go through it, keeping in mind this article is written to help jive up interest for the book:

"It’s a cycle in which colleges spend more and more money chasing research projects, building luxury dorms and academic centers to attract wealthy students, and engaging in activities that compel them to compete against each other, rather than focus on their own students."

This has to do with federal student loan subsidies.

"Families suffer, of course, but the long-term impact transcends that. “The converting of public funding into higher tuition focuses the student on assuring her future income to cover higher costs and debt,” he writes. At stake, he believes, is a citizenry that sees college not as a place for in-depth learning and inquiry, but as a means to economic security, forcing colleges to conduct themselves more like a business, and less like a public good that all students can afford."

I think that ship sailed back in the mid 1990's. I really don't know of many students these days that are there to 'just learn', most are there because they know they need to have a diploma to have any realistic chance in the job markets. Again, this issue stems from federally back loans in part.

"But I think some of it is just that it was more important to have a kind of a national profile than it was to do really good regional service. Shifting from regional service to national profile created competitive costs; you just tend to duplicate a lot of things that other people have. Then later, in the 1990s and 2000s, when you’re starting to compete for blue chip out-of-state students, the arms race in facilities accelerates, and just re-accelerates after 2008."

Here he is talking about the US News rankings, something that I remember hearing about while applying to college, but not really ever reading. I don't know what the faculty are seeing and hearing, as I am not one, but are those ranking really that important to prospective students? I was under the impression that they just applied to schools, see what came back, and then chose, though that may have been just me. Many schools have an application fee, but can they really be garnering that much money on the fees as to justify all these amenities? I guess that I am saying that using US News as a scapegoat is ... fishy to me.

"Undergraduates and academic graduates students became more of an afterthought at the senior management level. They were kind of the revenue source, in terms of tuition and general funds per capita, but then, after that, they were not at the center of policy. We really lost our focus."

Sing it from the mountains, Brother!

"Rebuild high-end cognitive skills, so that these folks don’t just go down the street to the machinist shop that’s still open if they lost their factory job. They can be eligible for a whole range of jobs, or build jobs and businesses on their own with these skills."

The sentence is a bit confusing, but is he saying that a machinist job is a default one? Wouldn't he just say a barista or a Target checkout person as a default type job? I think that the author's words here may have been somewhat mis-typed.

All in all, the author's book adds yet another piece to the jeremiads of countless academics. The core issue, it seems, is the money. We all idealize this gilded age era of Harvard and Teddy Roosevelt, but forget that those were the scions of America, with near limitless credit if not money outright. My father once told me 'if the office is a mess, then the secretary is stealing'. The author may be on to something when it comes to this mess. Perhaps there is a lot of corruption going on that is responsible for this very large issue of funding problems.