Curious how these school end up doing. When I was deciding what to do for college I really liked a place in Florida called New College. Horrible area (lots of old people) and apparently the place is weird (never visited), BUT the idea they have of creating contracts per semester and graduation based on completion of the required number of contracts is pretty cool version of this. It sounded like a whole college exp of basically self-researching/learning.

Didn't think it'd be good for CS so I didn't, but I imagine that's what the most successful of these schools will do to keep people creative and avoid the whole "one person does all the work"-group-projects.