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<p>Currently colleges, especially private schools, are free to charge as much as they want (or as Olin did for several years, nothing at all) and require students to pay according whatever schedule suits the school. Again, by what legal mechanism would you force schools to charge only according to your notions of a good schedule? If some private college wants its students to pay as they go, how are you going to stop them?</p>
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<p>Ah good, you see the huge flaw in your own thinking. You are providing a powerful financial incentive to schools to make absolutely sure everybody gets a degree no matter how dismal their performance. </p>
<p>So how can “we” can make sure they won’t weaken their requirements or simply give everybody at least a C in every class? </p>
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<p>Oh, you already answered my question: we can’t. Within 10 years under that system a college diploma will be worth less academically than a high school diploma is today.</p>
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<p>Right, but I never said said that academics can research literally anything they want. As I referred to in my post, peer-review is the current mechanism that decides the merit of proposed research and thus who gets the available funding. If a prof can’t convince a committee of his/her colleagues of the merit of the research it goes unfunded. That’s the current system and it works quite well.</p>
<p>What I object to is some uninformed person like you deciding in advance which topics or or entire fields of study aren’t worthy of research funding simply because you don’t see any value to them. Peer review committees do it only imperfectly. I’m sure peer committees have made many mistakes. But having people who know nothing about it ban funding for entire fields of scholarship based on some theory of college reform is pure folly.</p>