Reinventing College

TAE holds that the increasing cost of tuition is not increasing the quality of college education. Graduates are not smarter than they were, and graduation rates do not correlate with tuition costs (nor does tuition rate increase correlate with inflation).

Meanwhile, students are becoming more and more heavily strapped to the boat-anchor of their student loans, which often haunt them for the majority of their adult lives (disclosure: TAE is heavily strapped to the boat-anchor of his student loans, which will haunt him for the majority of his adult life).

Is there a fix? Could the screwed up awesomely awesome American health system suggest this fix? What if we could set up college tuition/student loans the way an employee's PPO works: you go to the doctor, the doctor charges whatever they want, then your PPO slaps the doctor in the face and pays the doctor whatever they want, and you don't pay the doctor anything...but you pay an arm and a leg to the PPO provider.

If we adopted this system for college tuition, an overarching authority could use graduation rates, quality of professors, post-graduation employment rates, post-graduate education acceptance rates, and a variety of other factors to place a numerical value on that college, which is what the student loan people would pay for a student's tuition.
This would allow Haaaahhhhvud to still accept the elite 1,600 uberstudents to their school, and charge what they wanted, but would require them to back up their rates with deliverables, like students that are gainfully employed, not out-of-work liberal arts majors who are crutched by their student loans for-ev-er. Other schools, who graduate an abysmal number of students but charge lower rates, would find incentive to increase their graduation rate; it means they could charge more. Expensive, private schools would not lose their haughty identities in this system; they would merely have to produce quality education to justify their price.
Suppose a school charges more than their accredited value? Well, the student loan only pays what the school is worth, and the school has to eat the rest.
But what if the school refuses to accept students who are on the student loan valuation program? Well, fine. If a university doesn't want to be a part of the student loan valuation program so they can charge more, they certainly have that right. However, no students requesting loans will receive them towards those schools that are not in the student loan valuation network.
What about schools that charge less than the student loan valuation amount? The student loan valuation amount is simply the "cap" amount a school may charge a student. If a school charges less, the student loan will cover the amount of tuition, whatever it is, up to the "cap."

It is pretty much foolproof. That's why the country's medical system works so well. Right?

Right..?


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