Let me try to take the bait in all its seriousness, for potential YC companies.

This article creates heat and smoke but not much illumination - motivation without direction. Irony here is both the epitaph and murderer of citizen education and culture being lamented.

Rome the Republic gave rise to consummate ironists, and the correspondingly detached professional classes allowed Imperial Rome to flourish. Must we follow?

Yes, tech bears some responsibility (and credit) both for the means of production and the incentive influences on consumers, workers, and investors. But the question is, what would make a difference?

Stock options have been mostly successful at getting people to work together, as have reputation privileges on forums like this. But those might just be noise in the signal of vast profits or continuous attention highs.

No incentives really distinguish good from bad: profit and reputation work just as well for the black market and poorly-managed companies. In response companies try to adopt an ethos of operational efficiency or mission-orientation, but ethos devolves to signaling and tribalism.

My experience is that the only countervailing force is the formative lifeboat experience: when young having to work intensely together on things that matter, often losing some people as a result. This happened writ large in WWI and WWII, as soldiers came back guilt-ridden and dedicated to humbly building society (* ok relatively speaking), but it also happens in the small in college, just helping each other figure out what to do and how to learn what you need (with the sadness of watching some of your friends get lost). Somehow having worked together and suffered and lost makes you less inclined to take advantage of others, even when you can. (fwiw I believe there's a recent article on the sense of guilt being a distinguishing attribute of a leader.)

Political apathy, the great resignation, opting out of college (or lacking grit or work ethic or ...), people are detaching from systems they find toxic (some would say challenging): competition with foreign engineers or immigrant workers, cultural assimilation, political discussion of any sort, etc. If human relations are disciplined by exit (when consensual) or voice (when exit is not an option), high utilization rates of both mechanisms indicate that relations aren't good, largely because of forces introduced by tech.

No one would recommend a real lifeboat experience if you can avoid it, and they're not a scalable response in any case. However, I think they help, and I think college can deliver that, if it's 2-4 year residential, in-person, small-classes with a strong element of student self-governance culminating in the selection of a career as a life's work. The curriculum should expand attention spans, critical thinking, diversity of friend groups, and (above all) a sense of responsibility for the effects of your own actions on yourself and others, and the sense of agency and ownership, where you realize you can make a difference.

Obviously, college should not support or reward cheating, cramming for exams, collecting credentials, social isolation, marketable skills trumping professional judgment, privilege networks, decomposed learning, etc.

Tech's influence on education should not be to scale horizontally but vertically. If the article is right that education is contracting demographically and burdened with bureaucracy, it has the two characteristics that make it ripe for tech disruption -- not by scaling single classes to world audiences, but by making small intensive environments economically feasible and enriching.

For heaven's sake, the next generation has to be grounded enough to manage climate collapse, authoritarianism, and technology-driven disruption. It's the least we can do for them!