Higher Education in A Chaste Maid

The Norton’s introduction to this play proposes that “the play’s look at education in Cambridge, seen from a London perspective, suggests that it amounts to exactly nothing.” Is this really what Middleton means to express through his ridicule of Tim’s self-promotion as a scholar? Is higher education mocked here, or is the blame on the “scholar” who seeks to learn only for self-aggrandizement? Going further, does the Tim plot as a whole have a greater function in the play? If Middleton does, in fact, intend to reveal that higher education fails to deliver what it promises, is it possible/useful to see this idea as parallel to the play’s mockery of “failed” religious practices (as expressed through the failure of Lent to regulate the consumption of meat, etc.)?