The mission of the Claremont Institute is "to restore the principles of the American founding fathers to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life", and to "remake American politics" as established by the founders in the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

Their mission indicates Claremont Institute is a total rightwing teabag organization. Their musings on the problems with education should be discounted out of hand just knowing those little facts. 

They have no honest position on the quality of education. One of the problems has been the co-opting of educational missions by corporate interests.Those interests have been making the claim since Ronald Reagan that student's aren't learning skills needed to get jobs but what they really mean is colleges and universities aren't producing conservative drones who want nothing more than to learn how to use software, answer phones and never question the process.

A college/university education is supposed to teach students to learn to think, to learn to solve problems effectively through thoughtful analysis, it was never supposed to simply teach people how to use software and answer phones,  or other simple tasks that anyone can learn. These folks are wrong about education in every sense and they aren't to be trusted or believed when it comes to evaluating what a proper education should be.

The NYT has a current article noting how colleges create a healthy economy and jobs, including private industry jobs, in Ithaca, NY  also noting that Ithaca’s model of education as an economic engine is one that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has made a priority this year as a strategy for all of upstate, where there are dozens of universities...

Claremont may be a Douhat loving tea bag outfit but there is no doubt that the 'credential-industrial' complex, universities, number one goal is the pursuit of dollars. Private lenders, text publishers, test tutoring organizations, testing organizations themselves, multi-application services and colleges all are culpable in shucking students and their families of money, there are lots of hogs at the trough.

If it means students are financially crippled, many colleges/universities by and large don't care, many lobbied against the (in the end watered down) Bill for them to take a dollar hit if students default on loans.

Even the College Board (SAT) hawks private student loans on their own website to get a place at the easy money student loan trough. The greed to shuck students is rampant and repugnant.

The recent move to allow the loan rates on government student loans to rise from the 3% level to market level was a blow to the nation's future, shackling students with even more debt, which will only harm the country and the economy.

Meanwhile, the number of tenure track professors drops, and adjunct part timers grows, in all likelihood reducing the quality of teaching.

Yes, it's a standard anti-affirmative action screed. The basic hustle here is to conflate affirmative action to selective colleges, which the writer wants abolished, with minority graduation rates across the board. The trick is that there are many more students in non-selective colleges (where affirmative action does not apply), and of course many more poor and minority students in those colleges. So most of the minority graduation rates have nothing to do with what happens at schools with affirmative action.

So the poor minority students who don't get sufficient support at a public commuter college (often students who are holding down one or more jobs and trying to raise a family) get used as "proof" that affirmative action at elite schools doesn't work.

As for your other point: people have been proposing rethinking college and making it more practical for well over a hundred years. And actually it's happened in a piecemeal way. By far the largest undergraduate major is some form of business degree. So that 40% of undergraduates with "practical" business degrees aren't getting jobs.