And that's the part where I think it collapses. In many fields (not just computer science), the best people get interested and tinker with the subject early on. Overall, if the only way to learn how to develop and maintain "the system" is in their 20s at a university (or apprenticeship or whatever), I think the quality will deteriorate over time and the system will become unmaintainable.
Jonathan Blow's talk "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization"[1] makes a good argument that software quality has already suffered significant deterioration. We've just gotten used to software not working. Reboot the computer; refresh the webpage; spend the morning trying to work around the "improvements", regressions, and removed features in the software that forced an update.
