Leaving aside how laughably wastefully the universities spend that money, disconnecting the borrower from the spender of funds is a massive anti-pattern.
Awareness of and discretion over spending is an extraordinary effective forcing function.
Pell grants are for education, it makes at least some sense they go universities. I’m not sure if you’re implying they should go to 2 year or vocational schools? Private, for-profit non-university schools are a large problem in the U.S. in that they have much lower financial returns for the students who attend them, and much lower quality educations. There’s an entertaining piece by John Oliver about this, among other sources.
I explained in another reply what I mean by far fetched products, which can be valued mathematically
I don’t know what you mean. Have you attended most universities? The paper & article you are commenting on demonstrate that education level determines innovation, statistically speaking. That can be for a wide variety of reasons, but it would be good to understand what they are any why before tossing the whole system out the window and spending billions, wouldn’t it?
> I explained in another reply what I mean by far fetched products, which can be valued mathematically
If that were true and it worked reliably, then all great ideas would already be funded. Can you link to said comment? I don’t see it.
Is it possible that Pell grants already provide more economic return than is possible with a far-fetched-idea plan for a small number of people? Pell grants do help enable education for millions, and as we see in the article & study, education is absolutely correlated with innovation.
I am curious how you propose to vet far fetched ideas in a short amount of time? 30K startups is a lot to review, even if the cycle was continuous and spread out over the year. And far-fetched ideas are difficult to rank and fund. Whether this program works, I imagine, would depend on lot on whether the vetting process reliably allowed in far fetched ideas with real potential and kept out far fetched ideas that have no potential, as well as people who aren’t likely to bring the far fetched idea to fruition.