The idea being you go to school for free and the University only makes money from a percentage of your future pay, thereby ensuring that it's students are actually prepared for the work force.
More here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesmarshallcrotty/2012/04/23/f...
Universities are awesome! We ruined them when we started thinking of higher education as preparation (or even requirement) for the workforce.
University should prepare you to be a thinker, a scientist and just generally an educated person. As soon as it becomes vocational the whole point is lost.
We don't need to "fix higher ed", we need to remember why we created it in the first place - to teach a small percentage of the population how to use critical thinking.
The best example I can think of that embodies that division of purpose is the UK, where you have Oxbridge and other elite institutions which function in the sense you are referring to, but you also have the Polytechnics that train people for practical careers.
There were a lot of execution problems with the system, so they went ahead and ruined it further with the bologna reform. Now we still have two types of university educations (on the bachelor's level), except they're both very practical and the only difference there is that the one stemming from the old theoretical tier makes it harder to get into master's programs.
Which then in turn ruins the master's because it needs to be dumbed down to enable people taking the "easier" tier to follow along and graduate.
As a result, even the PhD isn't what it used to be anymore ... at least on my faculty (CS).
It's essentially impossible to ensure that you never improve your employment opportunities while engaging in Pure Education or to ensure that you never develop critical thinking skills while in a vocational program (and it would not be desirable to do so anyway), but we could certainly more clearly delineate the intent of different programs and institutions. And then people could just pay for the experience that they actually want, rather than bundling them together.
So if you're not good for the industry, you're terrible at what you're made for, what good are you?
From my observation it takes about ~4 years for the really observable differences to settle in ... it might also just be maturity. Difficult to say :)
It's not impossible to self-teach, but as far as I can tell, self-taught people usually don't self-teach mathematics, at least not successfully. Among self-taught programmers without CS degrees, for example, it's quite common to find people who are skilled coders, but much less common to find people who have a strong mathematical grounding.
Heck, if you want someone who really knows statistics and data mining, to take one example, I haven't met many people without grad-school experience who fit the bill. Masters degree is good, some PhD experience is better (finishing a PhD doesn't matter as much; ABD is fine).
Most people I know are also self-taught and read a lot of the theory. If they are self-taught, what in God's name are they using to teach themselves?
STEM and Liberal arts students do make significant gains. Business majors actually show a LOSS.
Excuse me? Industries were made for people, not the other way around.
This being said, I have a problem with the mentioned "solution". Why would you have to repay "based on 5% of their annual income, the University of California for 20 years"? - it seems like a ridiculous huge amount of money. It would make sense if it were a lot more limited, say, for the first 5 years of work, where your educational background still matters - after that threshold, I say your experience is more valuable than your academic background.
I'm with the author of the article. Let the new solutions invade the market to make current colleges rates obsolete. Change will occur by itself.
Note: The US Concept of "tuition" covering Board/food/etc is basically un-heard of in any large numbers. (Possibly due to how consolidated into Major Cities we are.)
1) The society requires you to have a degree. A self taught programmer will likley get paid less than a college educated programmer. Even though the self taught one is more skilled.
2) College students blindly trust that the college education will get them jobs. What many don't know is that the the stuff they are getting taught is obsolete already. Many Occupy Wall Street protestors said that "We went to college, where are our jobs?". Who said going to college will get you a job?
Pretty much every teacher they had through k-12. That's who.
And the worst part is that because of the number of applicants you get degree-inflation where you have to spend more and more of your life in school to get a job that pays significantly above minimum wage.
Fuck it, I'll be poor.
Maybe my tune will change when I can afford college.
I'm a traditional university type. If pg can drag the Zuckerberg set out my physics department, that's fine by me.
I don't have a problem with rewards going to those who produce the best graduates - clearly this effect is already in play at the big name institutions.
I think that you need a certain amount of 'wildcard' where someone from a lesser known college can go on to be a big thinker or earner. I think otherwise you risk something with a positive feedback loop getting stuck in groupthink or turning itself into a formula which resists change and innovation.