A self perpetuating cycle of writing

I have just been reading Ian Jack's piece in yesterday's Guardian in which he effectively says that the age of making money from writing is at an end.

Ian maintain that this age has only really been prevelent in the last 20 years but now the ease of publication and the demand that everything be free on the net has brought it to an end

we can all be authors now and publish ourselves on the web. What you might call the moral and aesthetic case for writing - to think, imagine and describe and then communicate the result to an audience - can be satisfied online. It just doesn't make any money. The age of the gifted amateur is surely about to return.

But really grabbed my attention was the last part of his piece in whih he wonders why there are growing numbers of people still applying for writing and journalism courses?

Why do young people apply? Because they think they can be the next Zadie Smith. Why do universities encourage them? Because money can be made from fees. Is this responsible behaviour? We need to weigh the smashed hopes of creative writers against the financial needs of their tutors, who are themselves writers, and earning the kind of money that writing would never supply. A closed little dance: tutors teach students who in turn teach other students, like silversmiths in a medieval guild where a bangle is rarely bought though many are crafted, and everyone lives in a previous world.