It is a discouraging article. It also reminded me that this trend has been in the works a very long time, over generations, so it is frightening to think how difficult it will be to reverse it meaningfully, if it is possible at all. Harvard is only a small part of the crisis.
I remember my experience with an intern I had at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, an Economics major from the University of Michigan. She was eager and hard-working, but she was a terrible writer, her research was sloppy, and her critical thinking skills were sub-par. One day, she came into my office after work-hours angry and tearful. She said that she was a straight A student in her major at the university, and that she had never had a B in high school, and couldn’t understand why I was so critical of her performance in my foundation. I told her, “Well, Vicky, they lied to you. I’m sorry. It’s not your fault, but you have a great deal of lost time and under-developed skills to overcome, and it’s not going to be easy. I’ll do what I can to help while you are here.”
She eventually became a lawyer. I don’t know if that’s a happy ending or not.
The song above, from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Gondoliers,” astutely sums up the flaw inherent in all of the factors that led to the crisis: the socialist obsession with equality in outcomes, the ludicrous desire to make everyone a winner so nobody loses, the anti-American delusion that it is cruel to reward individual excellence, the distribution of college degrees to as many people as possible as a predicate to “getting a good job,” the warped logic of seeing affirmative action as a remedy for racial discrimination rather a continuing catalyst for it. As Don Alhambra sings (in the 19th century, Victorian comic opera), “When everyone is somebody, then no one’s anybody!”
How could our culture forget that?
Ethics Alarms 
The labor market will instill some discipline here. Employers know that a degree from Harvard and other colleges do not have the same value as fifty years ago. Additionally, the grade inflation does not allow prospective employers to tell the excellent students from the poor students. Also employers are aware of affirmative action, rendering all the straight A’s from graduates from certain minorities suspect. This all makes it harder to gauge the value of the degree a prospective employee is holding. So if you read or hear about graduates who have a hard time finding employment, the decrease in value of college degrees is a factor.
I am afraid you are wrong. There are very few capitalists left in this country. Most companies are run by hired managers who report to a board staffed by the CEO’s of their competition. No one cares if someone is competent or not. They only care about their personal power and clique.