An Attempt at Fixing College Education


Oft-cited problems with college education include the irrelevance (obsolete nature) of what is taught, the college not working hard to get all students a job at the end, and high tuition fees.

Tyler Cowen writes of Lambda School in California as one private sector attempt to solve these problems. Here’s how it works. They give the student the option to pay zero tuition fees. Huh? What’s the catch, you ask:
“The deal is that students pay back 17 percent of their income from the first two years of work, if earnings exceed $50,000 a year, with a maximum payment of $30,000. Students who don’t find jobs at that income level don’t pay anything.”
It’s obvious how the idea hopes to solve the criticisms mentioned at the top of the blog: It is now in the college’s interest to get you a high paying job. That translates into better (relevant) teaching + having connections with companies that would hire you eventually.

Time will tell how this model will fare, but Cowen analyzes the risk that strikes most people immediately. Would “less talented, less hard-working individuals turn out to be the most likely to sign away part of their future income”? Possibly, but the school could decide to vet student intake based on sincerity as well.

More importantly, says Cowen, can this model work for fields like arts? Or is it suited only for fields like engineering and medicine? Cowen feels this idea is suited for the latter, not the former. But hey, this is too complex a problem that will have one magic bullet solving it entirely. It’s far more likely we need different solutions for different fields. And it is better to have multiple ideas attempted by the private sector rather than ideas prescribed centrally by governments.

In India too, we need to be trying out similar ideas. But for colleges to have any hope of getting parts of future income of students, we also need the bedrock of a unique identity system like Aadhar and a judicial system that handles cases first. It’s amazing how so many roads to better systems and options trace back to the importance of a unique identity system and yet such a large chunk of the population continues to oppose it…

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