First of all, what's being referred to here as "education" is really dozens of different categories of products -- it's very challenging to generalize about all of them.
Secondly, the author asserts that building a meaningful education business will take 20 years. It's interesting that he makes that assertion since he didn't spend 20 years on his own education business. But consider that every meaningful innovation always seems like it's 20 years away. (Indoor plumbing probably seemed at least 20 years away the day before it was invented.) But then, as soon as something is invented, it immediately seems obvious and commonplace. That's how innovation works; that's why it fascinates us.
The big problem with education is that most investors work on pattern recognition, which is to say they want to see some variant of something they've seen before. So they fund shitty businesses that really act more like media companies or software companies because they think that's how they'll achieve scale. And it's unsurprising that students are indifferent, because students want to be actually educated and your highly scalable education business essentially rickrolled them.