College education and the NCAA

There may be a way to kill the NCAA — corrupt institution that deserves to be dynamited — and at the same time address the problem of skyrocketing college costs. I can’t be the first person to think of this, but I could be one of a relative few who would be perfectly happy jettisoning the NCAA in the service of improving universities’ finances and, by extension, their students’.

This would have to start with a public university system, which could then lead to changes at private institutions.

1 — Beef up the junior colleges. Under this plan, junior colleges will become equal partners with full universities.

2 — In the public university system, allow any student who lives in a junior college’s “district” to attend, like an optional public high school. Students may fail and fail and fail, but because it’s optional, they can keep coming back and trying to earn their credits and paying their tuition. It’s key to create “districts” for JUCOs because…

3 — *Deep breath* Make the full universities in the public system only responsible for the final two (standard) years of college education; that is, they will only offer major-specific classes. Admissions to these schools will still be competitive, but will be based on students’ performance in junior college.

Junior colleges can offer their Associate Degrees and a litany of general education and prerequisite classes for a fraction of the cost that full universities charge for those same classes. Leverage that.

Students who test out of prerequisite classes in high school wouldn’t have to take those junior college classes. Some would probably end up at full universities a semester, or even a year early. That’s great!

You know what else is great? If private schools followed the public schools’ lead, there might pop up a bunch of new, competitive, private junior colleges. It would be a whole new tier of education, but one predicated on the idea that the first two years of university could fairly be a lot cheaper than the third and fourth years.

And a happy byproduct would be that with only two-ish years of attendance from students, the “upper” universities wouldn’t be able to field competitive NCAA sports teams, and so it wouldn’t be worth it to keep competing.

Of course, some interests would want JUCOs to affiliate with “upper” schools so that, say, someone attending San Francisco City College and another person attending San Francisco State University would be able to play on the same sports team, but in my fantasy, the legislation creating this tiered system prohibits such partnerships.