Undergraduates with family income below $200k will be tuition-free at MIT

Or, crazy idea, have the government pay all tuition up front for everyone and then collect an extra .5% on your income tax for every semester you attend (or .33% for every quarter). Obviously you'd have to put some limits on what colleges can charge to get paid from that pool of money.

Then you can't go broke from debt because it's a percent of your income, but it's also not "free" to address those who have concerns with that.

You could apply it to all outstanding school loan balances too. Get your loans paid off in exchange for an extra 4% income tax.

Sounds similar to how it works here in Australia

I actually quite like the system we have in the UK.

Graduates pay roughly 9% of their income above £27k towards debt repayment, and the remaining balance is written off after 30 years. Typical tuition fees are just over £9k per year.

This strikes a nice balance between encouraging people to carefully consider alternative non-university careers whilst also not preventing too many people from not being able to afford it.

Note my numbers are approximate because they can vary depending on when & where a person went to university a couple of other factors. Also I do think the system could be slightly improved (especially around maintenance loans) but on the whole has a good structure.

Make this .5% go directly to the university. Will incentivize universities to teach more useful skills

It would be a good system if the interest rate on the loan wasn't absolutely insane.

MIT is rich and can certainly front the money. If it’s such a great idea, let them do it.

That subsidizes useless degrees, low quality colleges, and punishes people who work in vocations (likely providing more value to society), among some other issues.

How does it punish vocations?

It would incentivize them to only offer majors that lead to high incomes. By pooling the money it removes that issue.

just a guess, but upfront money needs to come from somewhere, presumably everyone else that is working, including vocations.

jobs that pay well are a signal that there is high demand for this skill in our society and that more people need to develops these skills.

Why would we not want universities to respond to that signal?

What makes a skill useful?

Because the job of a university isn't just to produce highly paid workers. It is to improve society through education. And sometimes people need to learn things that don't pay well, just for the sake of learning them.

People make fun of English and Art majors, but yet the majority of people consume art and writing as their primary activities outside of work (watching TV and movies).

The world would be a sad, boring place without those majors.

This is what Horkheimer and Adorno called "instrumental reason" ("instrumentelle Vernunft").

It was funny when they capped the rate at 7% recently. The calculated rate of RPI + 3% reached 14% and it became just a bit too obvious that it's a scam. Luckily I went in 2009 when tuition was 3.5k.

It looks like you ignored supply and demand.