In a properly run society higher education would be very cheap and its utility would not be measured solely on whether or not degrees are directly used in employment.
Tangentially, this is likely a call for more leisure time (4 day work week, broadly speaking), but that will take time for politics and structural demographic compression to achieve.
There’s no speed limit (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3761013 - March 2012 (194 comments)
Not all of these are easily measurable, but all contribute to a prosperous and free society.
It would be interesting to measure. Critical thinking in particular doesn't seem to be taught.
I personally believe none of those skills were taught during my own engineering degree. For me it was a lot of simple regurgitation against closed ended test questions. In hindsight mostly a fucking waste of time: a piece of paper to get a job.