* What are the numbers? What are they selling?
* What benefits? What would "anything else" be?
* Is there anything to take home from that drawn-out paragraph?
Sounds like a bullshit theory to me.
Schools, colleges, associated faculty and staff, parents, politicians, employers, etc.
"What are the numbers? What are they selling?"
Degrees, GPA, US News rank, X vs educational attainment (e.g. future earnings potential), etc.
"What benefits?"
The story of school. That is, what it means to be well educated/qualified is having a degree, having gone to a good school, having gotten a good GPA, etc. The social currency these things bring is all tied up with the story of school, or its foundational myth, or whatever you want to call it. By going through the system you earn the right to invoke the story.
"What would "anything else" be?"
Anything else. As it stands the only way to renounce adolescence is to become sanyasi sankalpa, which isn't a very good option.
"Sounds like a bullshit theory to me."
Maybe it's a bullshit theory, maybe it's the most poignant observation about western civ ever made, but you're smart so figure it out for yourself, I'm not here to play Bodhisattva.
My own thinking is that it is impossible to end adolescence because American society is structured around competition, and competition depends on measurement. And because there's no good theory on what can verse can't be measured, it's too easy for the proponents of adolescence to put some numbers on what they're selling. And because these metrics make the benefits of adolescence seem more salient than the benefits of anything else, adolescence will always beat out every other option, short of some radical philosophical shift in society, which is beyond the scope of this movement.