Elon Musk on universal basic income: 'It's going to be necessary'

I was thinking the other night, what if, instead of universal basic income, we paid people a subsistence wage to be students or apprentices? This has the positive benefit of encouraging the spread of information and a culture of self-improvement. Additionally, since it involves some "work" the argument that it would create freeloaders is greatly mitigated.

The only problem with this idea now is that our higher education system is way too slow, inflexible and bureaucratic. This idea requires a much higher density of community colleges than currently exists, though with the aid of MOOC they could be much smaller and leaner than the current community college model.