When would I have had time for significant manual labor in college? Ask a grad student working 72 hours a week in the lab to grow their own food instead of snarfing down ramen at their desk, and see how much research gets done. :/
Part of his proposal is that people would never be forced to leave. I suspect that many grad students would trade a year or two longer researching at a more relaxed pace, combined with some less intellectually intense manual labor, for how things work now.