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> But then this would lead us back to only wealthy kids being able to afford "the arts".

To the extent that we want to fund talented but not wealthy kids in the Arts, let's spend the money on explicit scholarships for them. Then at least it's transparent what we are paying for. Much better than funding them by having them take impossible loans funded from some slightly disguised arm of the government, which we will hound them about paying for decades, and eventually write the money off.

"Percentage of future income" sounds like a great model to me, too. IIRC this is what the Australians did? Only I would prefer for the percentage taken to be something negotiated (within limits) by a private lender, because the offers made would provide valuable information to those signing up.

You're thinking of "Income Share Agreements" which have made their way into the USA.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/03/why-on...

"ISAs provide students money to cover college costs, and in exchange, students agree to pay back a percentage of their future income for a set period of time—interest-free and capped. At Purdue, for example, a senior majoring in economics who took out $13,000 in a “Back a Boiler” ISA would pay 4.39 percent of her income over 100 months, up to a maximum of $32,500."

"If a student struggles to secure a job after graduation or earns less than $20,000 per year, the college would collect no money. If a student is extraordinarily successful financially, Purdue could be paid back up to 250 percent of the amount originally awarded."

That sounds good, thanks. Although it seems like the terms are fixed, and it's only smallish amounts for already-attending students, but still a great start.

I imagine there are a lot of university foundations watching the Purdue experiment while planning their own version of ISAs. Taking loan interest away from banks and injecting it back into university endowments has to be a very appealing idea.

The unfortunate reality is that careers in arts are notoriously unpredictable, and can easily have next to zero returns on education investment even for people who have good high school performance. At least for many creative types of carts, people can and do find stable employment in things like constructing stage sets, film editing, etc. But between 100 high school painters, actors, poets, and writers we realistically can't predict which ones will succeed. It's not that only wealthy kids can afford to dedicate themselves to art, it's that wealthy kids have better resources to endure the unpredictable nature of art industry.

> Government funded universities would solve this, because they would set the price, but we'd probably lose out on a lot of great programs. You could also solve this by outlawing charging tuition and switch college funding to being a percent of the graduate's future income. Of course, this would get the colleges to optimize for only majors that have high incomes after graduation, and we'd lose all of our philosophers and writers and artists (which I personally think would be a bad thing).

I disagree that this is a bad thing. We need to stop trying to convince ourselves that college is about turning out "well-rounded individuals". That mentality stems from the roughly 2 centuries when university's job was to socialize elite young men in upper class society. Contemporary university is about preparing individuals with skills that will be desirable in the job market. Charging tuition via income sharing will make colleges emphasize high income majors, which in turn benefits graduates who now have skills to work in high income jobs.

> Is it to create well rounded individuals with a broad base of knowledge, or is it to prepare people for careers? Up until about 80 years ago, it was exclusively the first, and mostly for children of wealthy people to go and learn a broad base of knowledge.

What’s your support for that?

Take even the most elite school, Harvard. Engineering since the early 1800’s. And how many of those med, law, and divinity students weren’t there for vocational training?

So before the 1900s, Harvard had a classical curriculum, meaning even engineering majors were required to study the humanities. I don't mean the humanities as we have them today. I mean, they were required to read primary sources in the liberal arts, so philosophy, linguistics, literature, mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, etc. Recall that engineering, law, and medicine are, historically, at least, liberal arts -- all such professionals would have had this education. This changed in the late 1800s, during the presidency of Dr Eliot. They compromised by getting rid of this curriculum (seen as unnecessary for an industrial nation) and instead marketing the reading list as a 5 foot bookshelf so others could self-study this lost core curriculum.

Today, some liberal arts colleges (including some engineering colleges) still require a core curriculum, but such a thing is increasingly rare at large universities, and non-existent at public schools. Moreover, even among the liberal arts colleges, a broad classical education is exceedingly rare, except for a few colleges like Thomas Aquinas.

The hybrid approach sounds a bit like this: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/03/why-on...

government funded universities exist in the form of state schools and community colleges. Yet we still hear stories of people who chose to go to a private, expensive college and take out loads of debt.