This is a terrible article and I don't know why it's near the top of HN.

Libraries do a much better job of directly serving the poor. Universities, at best, tend to do this indirectly, if at all. Most university students and professors are already middle class or higher.

This came off as a rhetorical device with little meaning. First, there's an implicit value judgement that "serving the poor" is better than serving the "middle class". It's not clear why this should be true and even if the judgement itself were true, the author does nothing to backup his claim that libraries serve the poor and universities don't.

Maybe serving the middle class by producing a highly qualified workforce eventually helps the poor more than just throwing money at libraries. I don't know if this is the case, but if we're the in the business of throwing out assertions that we like I'd like to throw this one into the mix.

The author needs to do a much better job of convincing us that libraries are more of a social good than universities. And we're looking for more than just a few nicely written anecdotes.

Universities, while sometimes performing valuable research, are constantly wasting huge sums of money. Much of this money comes from loading up 17-to-21-year-olds with crippling student loans.

Universities are constantly wasting huge sums of money? How and where? I'd like to see some citations please. And why is the student loan system a criticism of the university rather than the financial aid system currently practiced in the US. Awfully muddled thinking here.

Libraries are famously impartial and nonjudgmental, and have no agenda other than to provide equitable access to information to anyone who desires it. Most university departments are rife with ideology and are hostile to conflicting views.

I'm going to ignore this bit which sounds suspiciously like right-wing propaganda.

Libraries are open and free to everyone. What they do only improves people’s prospects. The primary purpose of universities, granting credentials, is by definition exclusionary. They improve the prospects of a few at the expense of others, by fostering an environment where people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value, and erecting unnecessary barriers to individual prosperity.

This is a laughably poor argument. Who says people are expected to have degrees before they can do anything of value? Many of the most important innovators of our times do not have college degrees. And certainly nobody is erecting an unnecessary barrier to "individual prosperity".

If society or more specifically big business values college degrees, this isn't an indictment of the university itself and the solution certainly isn't to reduce funding so that fewer degrees are given out. Also, it's not a zero-sum game. Granting certifications to a few doesn't improve their prospects at the expense of others.

I think it's ironic that the OP used a computer and the internet to publish his propagandist rant; an action that would've been impossible without all the academic research into computing and networking systems in the last few decades. I'd argue that the economic fallout of that research alone has more than paid back whatever money the US government has invested in universities.