Many people also do not belong in an Engineering program, and that's why the 101 classes are designed to weed people out. That system already exists in higher education. At my (liberal arts) school, we have a two-strike policy. Strike 1 is when you have a sub 2.0 GPA in a semester; that gets you an academic suspension for 1 semester. You can rejoin only if you retake similar courses elsewhere and meet a minimum grade requirement.

If you are allowed to re-enroll, you have 1 strike left. Another sub-2.0 GPA and you're gone.

If the US brought such a generation-transforming policy like this to the table, the easiest part of it would be to set that minimum standard across all participating schools. Most likely already have something close to this in place now.

Anyone with a pulse can get a 3.0 GPA in college. Due to grade inflation a "C" has become a B. A 2.0 GPA in college is basically straight Fs. In order to average less than a 2.0 in college I would imagine you would have to not show up for your exams and refuse to do any assignments.

That's just not true. Have you ever taken organic chemistry, electromagnetics, or differential equations? They're incredibly hard courses, no matter how you slice it, and I'm just speaking from experience at a low-to-mid-level school. The entry-level computer science course at CMU (15-112) supposedly takes around 40 hours per week to complete homework for. Courses on the pre-med track will have pretty unforgiving curves too.

1: Make college much more difficult. 2: Allow people to enter it and fail. People need to be made aware that just because they passed their undergraduate work, they really aren't as smart as they think they are.

Most people are (somewhat) stupid in their early 20s. I don't disagree that not everyone belongs in university, however, most people don't realise that until it is too late and are already in debt.

Free higher education works well in the European countries that offer it.

What better investment could a society make than allow someone to pursue a field they are passionate about, and letting them start life with a clean slate? I'm by no means a socialist, but I think university should mostly be free.

The only thing (student) debt does is tie someone down. To a lifestyle or employer that they actually should have no loyalty to.

Tax brackets don't need to rise, resources just need to be moved from alternative things (i.e. military spending).

>Free higher education works well in the European countries that offer it

It depends what you're looking at. I think it hurts local communities by exporting all the young talent and gets people plugged into the white collar, global economy.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy what I do, but I think a lot of the time in college could have been better spent learning how to build houses, make furniture, grow food, etc.

If the government is going to pay for it I would like it to be a better resource for enriching the nation, not just a tool for generating more wealth.

> grow food

Then go do a degree on agro engineering ?

...That happens in the USA anyways.

Are there statistics that compare open admissions and selective schools?

(If performance at an identifiable subset of schools is better, then it's more that spending resources on the other schools is questionable than it is that higher education is in a crisis)

Look at the income distribution of new attorneys. It's very easy to get massive amounts of loans for the countless law schools out there but significantly harder to get a decent job as an attorney unless you go to a top 14 school.

Median salaries pool are much higher at the top yet tuition is really similar across all schools.

This is true with undergraduate programs as well. Median starting salary after graduation at University of Florida is 52k. FIU and UCF, both a few hours away with similar programs? 46k.

University of Houston? 53k. Rice University a few miles away? 64k.

I've named schools that are all pretty good...the story gets much worse with private universities that are not selective. There are always people who do fantastic regardless of which school they go to but in aggregate schools matter a lot.

Agreed. College has become just another high-priced consumer good. And universities are happy to act just like day care if it means more happy, paying customers.