Strip the taxpayer funding out of college education will teach what needs to be taught and not be overburdened with crap.
Even better, the best and brightest students can learn on the cutting edge without having to slog through a cesspool of students who don’t belong there.
I went researching about a year for requirements of a degree in the 1880-era. So I came to a three-star college that listed their one and only degree (yeah, just one). It went through the forty-odd classes (Latin, speech, rhetoric, basic geometry, composition, Roman history, Greek philosophy, and basic civil engineering).
The end result was your appearance in front of a committee at the end of four years and you’d answer some fairly difficult questions to show you had gained some vast amount of common knowledge.
The cost? That part I could never get around to. I doubt if a guy paid more than $500 a year for the various classes taught. His food and board probably amount to a thousand dollars.
That would include ending the tax-exempt status of private schools' massive endowments (e.g. Princeton has an endowment of $18.2 billion, on which they earned 11.7% in FY 2013).
Better yet, have college transcript be public record, so that students know that their future employers will see just what sort of courses they took.
“Strip the taxpayer funding out of college education will teach what needs to be taught and not be overburdened with crap.”
My engineering degree required (as I recall) 15 hours of “non-technical, culturally related” classes. I wanted to substitute biology labs. The engineering dean told me, “I’m sorry. The college requires that you take courses that have no use whatsoever. It’s sort of a tax on engineering students so the other colleges get their money out of your time here. That’s why it’s a hard requirement. No engineering student would otherwise step foot in those buildings”
Stripping out the taxpayer funding would require people (i.e., potential students and their parents) to make real life decisions regarding return on investment. You want to study art history and think you can support yourself with that degree? Go for it! Just don’t try to make me pay for your folly. But then, I knew I wanted to be an engineer by the time I was 12. My university required “X” hours of “non-technical electives”, so I took history courses for those credit hours. They were interesting and helped jack up my GPA. But I knew I could never make a decent living with a BA in history.