I think the reason that solely skills-based institutions never flourished is due to the kind of cronyism and old boy networks that the article strangely seems to see as one aspect of the current system that is worth preserving.
The difficulty is in persuading those people who are hiring, who went to university, to value qualifications from skills-based courses, rather than assuming that the people who obtain them are lower class and too thick to go to university.
The difficulty is in persuading those people who are hiring, who went to university, to value qualifications from skills-based courses, rather than assuming that the people who obtain them are lower class and too thick to go to university.