Bring back dedicated trade colleges, business and engineering and even the sciences free of unneeded fluff focus on making these employment focused colleges and to move on to advanced terminal degrees. Cut the radical elements from education.
Universities provide the means to ensure critical thought. It promotes the radical, by definition. Looks like you want them to cheapen their learning methods and just become parrots of technical material.
Universities used to be bastions of critical open debate, not much now, with 'trigger warnings' and the 'social justice warriors' considering any speech they are offended by as violence against some class of people its now pointless. Not to mention all the useless majors such as gender studies, transgender studies and many liberal arts majors taken by students who shouldn't even be in a four year college due to lack of preparation and insufficient IQ [115+]. I would make one change in student loans they should have to fill out ones major after two years and the loans should favor STEM and majors in employment demand and reduce funding for other majors and the money should be for tuition, books, housing, food and student fees and I would not allow it for private institutions tuition no higher than public universities using the 'national average'.
Who are you to decide what is useless and what isn't? Surely that's up to the student. How come freedom of choice goes out of the window? Where there is employment demand there is already student interest. They are capable of making long term decisions you know.
Government backed loans and grants, the government should have a lot of say in what its used for, you get a full ride scholarship or can pay out of pocket then fine take what you want as a major. Minors and electives I would leave for students to take 'enrichment' classes.
Education produces positive externalities. There's no evidence that those effects are restricted to the small set of courses that you deem desirable.
Government backed money the whole loan system is broken they should have tied all funding for tuition and other costs to inflation when they passed the law setting them up so schools couldn't jack up costs faster if they wanted students to take out the government backed loans. But they didn't and schools jumped at the money and it was a feeding frenzy. So now the best fix is to me limit funding based on the likely chance the student will get a job IN a field of study, and track that and punish the schools for failing to help students do that. And they need to revoke the government protections in cases they failed the students too much and ask the schools for the money they loaned them earlier for the education. The age of the general scholar and open minded man or woman of letters and science is dead, lets bury it and make schools meet current needs.
