I think more and more people have realised in recent years that you don't need a university degree to be well-rounded and highly educated there is (of course) big resistance. What would be the steps to make this more societally acceptable? Not only would this be great but would also create pressure on universities to be better. I was talking to some students at a prestigious college and they were telling me how them the entire uni is becoming just a line of work for IB and tech. This uni is famous for quirckyness but is moving towards the opposite.
Modern society is actually still remarkably efficient at finding top tier music/sports talent and having it developed very early on. Some may claim that it is unnecessarily harsh but it reliably gets results. In this case the need for such talent is directly tied to the attention economy. Better performers, better click-through rates.
But we are in the attention economy and there's no going back, so we still get back to how to get attention directed at what would be an education (in the traditional sense of the word). Nowadays we have incredible people on YouTube who create far better content than universities, but not the actual mechanisms by which you can trust that someone has digested the content, which leads to those content creators not being adequately compensated. There's a useful AI tool in here somewhere. This is also a content curation problem related to >>2513.
>> What would be the steps to make this more societally acceptable?
You would have to be able to incentivize convergence on the truth, without making it profitable to do so. In other words, truth has to be the underlying fundamental motive and principle of coordination, rather than money or opinions. In that way money would flow towards education as a derivative or coincidental after-effect.