Yea for anything faith based a rule I follow is to never trust with anything more than I'm willing to lose. This is the equivalent of giving out your bank card and pin to someone and asking that they kindly take $10 out and no more please. Doesn't matter if the bank rep tells me that is the only way to give money to the customer, I'd sooner take the hit to my reputation than to risk such a terrible worst-case scenario as the OP seems to now have learned.
Development usually involves tasks that range from the easy and mundane to the difficult and arcane. And those tasks are usually not simply assigned to a single engineer to either succeed or fail - usually the hard stuff is given to the more advanced coders and the easy stuff is reassigned to whoever can handle it. I can imagine a single coder on a 10 person team who can spend 10 years on a code base doing all the 'easy' parts. There are always tons of maintenance tasks (or 'bookkeeping' bits of work as I like to call it) that are simple, boring, and ever-present up for grabs.
Coding is just like anything else - some people only do the minimum in order to get a "passing grade" and so they never really get past the basics. It isn't so much that they code without knowing how to code, but that whoever is in charge of managing them isn't necessarily an expert on coding and often times people find it easier to improve their ability to trick their manager rather than the difficult task of learning new or more advanced things.
Not sure what the article is addressing specifically, but I assume any limits on "non-profits" or charities are for the sake of short-term consumer protection. Suppose I want to be charitable and help some people by donating my money. By myself, I don't have enough resources to really make an impact due to economies of scale or lack of influence or whatever. So I decide that the smarter thing to do is to pool my money with others that have a similar idea so that we can have a greater impact together than the sum of each of us individually.
Now, how exactly can I determine who is trustworthy enough to donate to? Sure, I might demand records and accountability but honestly as an average joe, who has the time and knowledge to go through the numbers and cross reference them to see how accurate they are? The simple solution, in my opinion, is to have some government-enforced class of business that have certain limits in place (e.g. maximum % of revenue that can go towards non-charitable activities, limits on compensation, etc..) that I can donate to knowing that at least those limits are in place.
Of course, some might argue that the restrictions and limits are detrimental and in fact without them we might achieve a greater impact but then can't you simply test that theory by starting a company that does charitable work, registering a normal business (not non-profit or whatever) and seeing how well that works out?
You said it right - art school is a luxury. Most of the comments FOR art school focus on the non-monetary benefits of going to art school which some people - who I assume are the main target of the article - simply don't have the luxury to pursue. For those that attend art school with the hope that it will improve future compensation / job opportunities, the article is spot on.
Personally art school sounds like a great resource but unfortunately the reality is that I'm probably going to spend most of my life barely getting by as it is. I guess that's the problem with capitalism that people seem to forget about sometimes: you're going to have people (a whole bunch) at the very bottom of the pyramid / ladder / whatever who will never be able to rise above basic sustenance.