argumate:

Silicon Valley is backing a novel idea: Instead of charging students tuition, students go to school for free and are required to pay back a percentage of their income after graduation, but only if they get a job with a good salary

wow that’s incredible, that’s exactly how Australian universities work today.

I saw a bunch of wits on twitter like “ha ha, those brain geniuses invented taxes”, but a big part of the defunding of state-funded universities has been how they tie into the “rural brain drain”, where college graduates tend to settle in major cities, even across state lines, rather than where they came from

Cause Wisconsin legislators can say “this is a workforce development program to build up the population and economy of the greater NYC and SF Bay metropolitan areas, why are we paying for this?”

(And rural ones can further say “and to the degree it’s not, it’s building up the blue metropoles of Madison and Milwaukee, why are we paying for this?”)

And a regime where funding comes from where graduates go rather than where they came from might help with that, though I remember some pilot programs like this a decade or two ago that amounted to nothing so