Is there any relationship between arts education funding and the 'arts export industry'? The arts existed long before university and the most successful don't appear to have been trained in a university. Stross himself went to CS and not the arts.
My impression was that arts eduction is generally an exploitative scam. As someone (Grayson Perry?) said, they teach all of the stuff you can't learn and none of the stuff you can.
You'll spend 100% of your time trying to develop an 'art practice', which is very likely to entail staring into the middle distance for most your course, or perhaps half reading some philosophy books (preferably ones with no agreed interpretation, so no one can tell if you've actually read them or not).
Meanwhile, you'll spend 0% of your time learning the durable skills you'll need to have a career - varies of by context, but project management and the technical skills for whatever your medium is would be useful.
They whole sector is obsessed with constantly reasserting its moral superiority - "artists are the enemy of dictators" etc. - while studious turning a blind eye to the fact that nearly all the students are hopelessly ill equipped to do anything when they graduate.
I could go on - but the culture of UK arts institutions is hopelessly broken in my view.
However, most of them will have been trained by someone who did.
Reduce arts education funding at the highest level and the reduction trickles down to the lowest levels.
You can look at China's history to see this. The civil service exams weren't perfect, and a lot of their most interesting people (artists, scientists, etc.) actually failed them because they didn't have the patience for all the rote memorization and for the conformity that success in that game required. Likewise, often the people who excelled at the exams (whether because of genuine talent or mere material ambition) turned into well-paid inconsequential bureaucrats, but--and this is key--the exams' existence, by forcing society to make it an unquestionable pillar that there must always be a supported market for intellectual talent, made China flourish for centuries, even if the exams themselves were flawed.
Indeed, what today's Chinese (meaning the leadership) understand well is that we in the West and especially the Anglosphere, by handing the keys over to our short-sighted, micro-optimizing merchant classes, have all but guaranteed our own decline. China [1] has thousands of years of experience at making sure that, no matter how rich a businessman may get, he will never attain even full respectability let alone the cultural influence requisite to corrode a society from within the way ours has. The West, which may not survive the disaster that has been neoliberalism, needs to learn before it is too late that spreadsheets themselves do not generate useful arts or scientists, never have and never will.
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[1] I may sound fawning on this particular point, but I'm not pro-CCP and never have been. China's maltreatment of Tibetans and Uyghurs is especially deserving of execration. Their government has done quite a lot that is wrong. However, China's 5,000-year commitment to, while allowing the merchant class to flourish when it is useful, keeping it in its rightful place below actual intellectuals, is a case of excellence (not unbroken in time, perhaps) we should try to replicate.
Define "actual intellectuals"? Rigorous scholarship can of course be valuable, especially if combined with broader community engagement - but most of the time the notion of an "intellectual" refers to nothing more than pointless navel-grazing, with very little in the way of real, enduring achievement.
To be honest, you raise a valid point; often the people who show the highest degrees of intellectual vigor are those the purportedly intellectual institutions reject. Einstein wasn't actually a poor student, nor was he ever thought to be stupid, but he was an absolute misfit in academia even then, and he would have failed out of the conformist environment today (in large part because, as an ostensibly mediocre graduate student, he'd never have gotten his 1905 papers published or read at all). Which raises the question of why we have them in the first place. Brilliant kids who grow up in Harlem will never get into Harvard; complete dolts from prominent families do; so why have it at all? It becomes a long discussion.
The issue in discriminating "navel gazing" from "enduring achievement" is just that latter adjective. We don't know ahead of time what will endure. We have to be more accepting of the 999 contributions and efforts that, in the long run, will not amount to very much in order to get the 1000th that will. The tradeoff is that, while we ought to nurture genuine contributions as if they all have intrinsic value, we have to get better as a society at preventing charismatic (or merely randomly successful) artifacts from taking up all the oxygen and starving what we really want to see. We have to be tolerant of intellectuals who want to offer their ideas, but intolerant of those who insist on only their ideas being heard.