Is higher ed a fraud?

Some weeks ago, an article alerted me to a new academic novel, Lords of Serendipity, by an English prof named Randy Boyagoda. He works now in Canada but originally came from Sri Lanka, where a good deal of the novel takes place. Spoilers ahead! The main characters are: Jack Bayern, a middle-aged widower who teaches Introduction of Statistics for Non-Majors at the mythical Arcadia Tech University, which might be MIT, but I can't tell. Jack has a daughter Katrina who is a freshman at Haven, one of the most elite schools in the Northeast. which her late mother also attended. Jack is teaching extra sections to pay Katrina's tuition. Katrina has a roommate from Sri Lanka called Cham, a young woman with quite a back story of her own. Young Allard Hamburger, a statistics grad student, is the senior Teaching Assistant in Jack's course. His mother Patricia Hamburger conceived him out of wedlock with a professor named Martin, an astronomer, who refused to drive her to the abortion clinic where…