I want to agree with your point, but also: someone who's middle-class enough to make it to uni in the first place won't cause much trouble for society.
Paternalism in the sense of 'we know what's better for you than you do' is perhaps justified for those people who really don't know better. But I don't think we should overextend that notion.
Well given that the article is about young people in schools, a little paternalism isn’t a bad thing.
Well, they also have actual parents.
I have to apologise, I was under this impression this thread was about university students, who should be old enough to fend for themselves (and enjoy respectively suffer from the consequences of their own actions). But I don't think anyone actually mentioned that age in the thread. I mixed it up with another one.
The students I teach are pre-university. It's called business school, and if a BSc is level 7, MSc is level 8 and PhD is level 9, then this is level 5. So they can become good programmers, but there's no math in the whole study programme.