Basically the Royal Society's scientific vulgarization cousin.

You just have to spend a few minutes with students until they complain about the courses or teachers. And you just have to spend a few hours with teachers until they complain about the students or broader system.

University is broken, and everyone knows it. The only question now is finding a viable, "political cash flow positive" path, into something better.

Bibliography:

The image of an university is basically their only real asset, which they extract money out of via undergraduate students in some countries like the USA, and by getting funding.

For this reason, universities will sacrifice basically any principle in order to give themselves a good image.

Although for profit companies also do this, it is simply on another level for universities.

If there is one thing that makes Ciro Santilli learn German, this is it (the Romance language are all the same, so reading them is basically covered for Ciro already).

Besides of course sexual selection, considering in this section only "formal learning" activities.

Consider e.g. the 2020 University of Oxford, where many many people are taking courses without any laboratory work (and also without much use at all) like literature and history, and they are paying about 9k pounds/year for it: how much it costs to study at the University of Oxford?.

Basically all of this could be done online from books.

Laboratories are impossible however, because expendables of every experiment you do cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars, not to mention crazy upfront equipment costs.

For this reason, the brick and mortar aspect universities should focus exclusively on laboratories, and ensuring that the students with the most relevant knowledge (which can be readily obtained online) get access to those laboratories. Students should of course fully master every aspect of theory pertinent to their experiments. principal investigators should hand pick whichever criteria they want to select their students, possibly based partly on exam as a service if they find it a useful metric.

Furthermore, the use of laboratories should put great focus on novel research. A lot of laboratory instruction could be done from video of an experiments. As much as possible, we should use laboratories for novel research. Related: Section "Videos of all key physics experiments".