1/ From extensive experience, I have come to oppose credentials driven education and it's counterpart, metrics driven management. I have opposed them on the ground that humans are not widgets.

Here are two books, coming from unorthodox university professors that I recommend.

2/ First, the case against college (the title "The case against education" is a mistake in my opinion, it should be "The case against college")

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education

It argues that the college degree is now primarily a "signaling mechanism" and not about learning. I agree.

3/ The second book "The tyranny of metrics" is a critique of how so much of modern management doctrine, in business, government and most institutions, is governed by metrics.

I had reached similar conclusions and this book lays out the case very well. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36644895-the-tyranny-of-metrics

4/ In America, the college degree is rapidly losing relevance, as major employers, starting in the tech industry, stop asking for it.

Colleges are also committing suicide by raising their prices dramatically, even as they inflict hyper-politicised woke nonsense on students.

5/ American industry paid a terrible price as metrics driven "scientific management" doctrines swept the corporate landscape.

India has been emulating America in both worshipping the college degree and in adopting metrics driven management.

6/ These doctrines will recede. Humans are not widgets, human beings cannot be "standardized".

At a deeper level of philosophy, the failure of these doctrines is also the failure of pure materialism.

Soviet collapse is another example of failure of materialism.

7/ What replaces such materialist dogma as it inevitably fails?

I will provide my thoughts.

As a first step, we must avoid attempts to centralize. Solutions have to be small and local, "human scale". That's a vital principle.

This is true in education and in business.