Author finished a Ivy League, Columbia University and write for Times but refuse to pay back loan that gave him all that?? I have no words for this person.
In economy nothing disappear. If he didn't payed next generation will. Increasing cost of education is mostly because some lousy liberal arts graduates choose to cheat their way.
Docker, Meteor, ElasticSearch, NPM there is plenty of start-ups doing infrastructure stuff.
Market don't need fast PHP compiler look how low is adoption of HHVM. PHP is legacy codebase used for simple CMS. If someone need performance it will use Java, Node.js etc