I wonder why we impart onto young people such an idealism about science only to have to crush it when they get older and must be informed that science, like everything else, is a business.
As we cram more and more people into the same cities, the same companies, the same institutions of learning, they're going to experience some failures to scale. This is one of those failures. Academia becomes hyper-competitive. There aren't enough jobs. School becomes too expensive. Home prices outpace inflation and wage increases by a factor of three or more. The world is just much more competitive today, and it will continue to become even more competitive.
I sometimes think about my grandfather, now dead, who was a sales executive for a major clothing company in the 60s and 70s. He was making $50k in 1960. According to an inflation calculator, that would be nearly $400k today in base salary. It astounds me to reflect on this and the fact that he didn't even have a college degree. A similar job today would likely only go to a graduate of Harvard Business School, Wharton, or something similar. There were many others like him; you didn't have to be a business whiz extraordinaire to land such a job fifty years ago. You just had to be dedicated, hard-working, personable, and passionate, and everything else would follow. But the world was just not nearly as competitive back then.
Can we explain why we seem to see an increasingly competitive society despite there being more actual stuff to go around?
I don't think this is a complete explanation, though, and your point is a good one.
I also believe that the transition from one-income to dual-income households has had a pretty deleterious effect on the buying power of the average household. Rather than providing financial security, the second income led to a bidding war on homes, cars, and schools. It's a shocking fact that today's dual-income family has less disposable income after necessary bills than yesterday's single-income family.
Actually that's not true at all. High-performing salespeople in tech (and other industries) are extremely well-paid, and tend not to have fancy degrees.
Sales is still a career in which hustle and results are valued over book smarts, and there is no branch of a company that is "closer to revenue" than sales.
Finally, the upper ranks of many Silicon Valley companies like Facebook are filled to the brim with graduates of HBS and similar. There are lots of ex-McKinsey consultants in VP positions in the industry.
Whether or not the upper ranks of Facebook used to work for Rajat Gupta is hardly relevant to the question of how much salespeople make!
The pessimistic answer is that idealists make very hard workers, such that by the time they become cynics they've already locked themselves into a career path and it's hard to get out of it.
It seems the problem we have with science being a business is the belief that money is fundamentally corrupting. I think that only applies to mismanaged money; it can also be seen as fundamentally enabling.
This precisely describes my experience in gamedev. Luckily, I can drop out and go into any of a dozen alternative computer-related career paths. I'm not sure any scientist is so well-off.
A third (rather modern) requirement might be to ignore what most people consider good practices and simply try to get as many things done as you can. The actual process of building things is mostly what increases your skill, not solely your study of how to build things.
The forth requirement for a computer science career is for someone to give you your initial break (hire you at a job). The only thing necessary for this is to find (a) an open-minded employer who cares mostly about whether you can build things rather than about what credentials you have, and (b) you can show a portfolio demonstrating that you can build things. Build a portfolio of personal projects -- the more visual, the better. Mine was to show demos of 3D game engines I made. They were simplistic, but they were pretty, and it got my foot in the door. If I wanted to become a webdev, I would put together a portfolio of websites I made. Note that you can make whatever you feel like making -- it doesn't need to have a purpose, just something like "here's my example checkout process I made for my example merchant website." Stuff like that.
There's always hope as long as you believe in yourself.