" it will pay $N per semester on behalf of any student who meets certain qualifications to attend that college"
Well right off the top how do you define "qualifications". I mean if your answer is (and this is a question not a statement) "meets certain testing standards" or "belongs to certain clubs and does certain activities" you will almost certainly disadvantage certain students that might get accepted because the total "package" of them (as a student and a person) balances out the student body.
Then what we will have is even more of a system that feeds students in that are trained in high school only one way - to test well. This of course has already been happening with test prep however my feeling is any "qualifications" will push us more in that direction.
> Well right off the top how do you define "qualifications"
Well, I don't really know. I agree with you that standardized testing is not a good way to do this.
Perhaps a system where anybody can attend but the public tuition stops being paid for them if their GPA falls below some threshold? But then you get the problem of shoddy colleges popping up that accept everybody and give everybody good grades. I think restricting the public tuition to non-profit schools would help solve that problem, in addition to strict caps on salaries of different classes of university employees. As long as people don't see running a shoddy university as a way to make money for themselves, they'll probably stay away from it.
Well right off the top how do you define "qualifications". I mean if your answer is (and this is a question not a statement) "meets certain testing standards" or "belongs to certain clubs and does certain activities" you will almost certainly disadvantage certain students that might get accepted because the total "package" of them (as a student and a person) balances out the student body.
Then what we will have is even more of a system that feeds students in that are trained in high school only one way - to test well. This of course has already been happening with test prep however my feeling is any "qualifications" will push us more in that direction.