Here's the main flaw I see in the current system:
Your student is also your customer.
That's it. That one flaw leads to all the other dumb shit involved in getting a college education.
If you make your classes too hard, your customers will leave and go to another college. So you make them easy, fun, whatever. You offer useless degrees and tell them they'll be able to get jobs.
I think a better model would be to have corporations be your customer, not the student.
So instead of applying for college, you apply for, let's say Microsoft. And if Microsoft accepts you, then they pay for your college and you have to work for Microsoft for a certain number of years after you graduate.
Now the colleges have to cater to their real customer, Microsoft, so they'll be incentivized to focus on actual useful classes that are relevant to the work they'll be doing.
And the college is not pressured to make it easy, they can hold students to the standard that Microsoft expects. And if they deliver shitty graduates that don't know anything, then Microsoft will choose a different college next time.
It's a win-win. Corporations get employees that actually have the skills they need, and students are happy because they don't have to pay for college, but they still get highly in-demand skills.
In this system it wouldn't take 4 years to graduate either. Since the college is incentivized to produce competent graduates, they'd remove all the useless fluff classes and you might graduate in 2 years instead of 4.
