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Desrtopa comments on Problems in Education - Less Wrong
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Having read The Shadow Scholar also, I don't think the author himself would stand behind a claim that Rutgers is an educational scam, although he certainly testified to it having an uncaring and incompetent administration which doesn't show much care for the education of its students. The sort of lost purpose educational aimlessness that allows students to graduate without really learning anything exists in universities all over the country, as do the students who retained his services and those like his.
If you haven't gotten that far in the book yet, it's for-profit colleges which he really attacks as educational scams.
"Educational scam" was my language, and may have been too strong. The author does describe Rutgers as a place where it's difficult to learn much (indifferent teaching, and a lot of institutional barriers to spending much time on learning).
Oddly, I haven't seen any complaints about something which might plausibly discredit the author-- spending much of his time drunk and/or drugged.
Although he's fairly open about that, I don't think he particularly stands out in terms of substance use among college students. I had plenty of peers in college who graduated with good-to-reasonable grades who I suspect used alcohol and marijuana to similar degrees.
In fact, I would have to say that they probably got considerably more out of college than I did, having gotten a lot of valuable networking done socializing while high.
My impression is that heavy alcohol use tends to increase people's level of anger, obsession, and resentment.
In other words, he might overestimate the pervasiveness of administrative abuse and neglect at Rutgers. It's also conceivable that his life was going worse than it would have if he was sober more of the time.
However, I searched on "rutgers r-u screw" and found this. It looks like, at a minium, the administrative style at Rutgers is significantly unfriendly to students.
I was almost an RU Screw victim - some data entry clerk recorded my high school class rank as 20 instead of 2, which would have rendered me ineligible for a rather generous state scholarship if my parents hadn't inadvertently discovered this.
I thought every college had something like this.
Conversely, I didn't believe this was a thing until I saw it happen during grad school (to undergrads).