I thought APIs had been established as non-copyrightable by numerous precedents, e.g. Lotus v. Borland, Apple v. Microsoft. Why do we need to go through this again?

The US Copyright Law Chapter 12 provides for reverse engineering, for the purpose of interoperability. So that would seem to negate any defense of copyright of an API, whose sole purpose is interoperability.

Sounds like a nice idea, but has the author actually run any numbers on this? I have doubts that some fraction of the excess income of a few standouts is going to foot the entire tuition bill for everyone else. It doesn't work at Harvard.

It seems to me that for this to work, even the average performers have to pay something.

Also, people investing in equity choose their investments. The accepted risk can lead to higher returns. This system invests money across the board but only takes income from the highest achievers. It can't pay off for the investors.

It could potentially be used in conjunction with the loan system, but then you have all the problems of the current loan system - subsidies driving up prices.

Harvard already has an interesting system, a pretty large expansion of the traditional need-based aid, where students from families making <$50k income pay no tuition at all in the first place, so the only loans they need are for living expenses and books.

Incidentally, that's one of the factors making the "college tuition has doubled" statistics a bit misleading as a measure of how much higher-education costs to operate. While the sticker price college tuition has doubled, the proportion of students paying sticker price has declined, so tuition revenue has not doubled. In addition, for public universities, the state subsidies have declined in almost all states, so tuition hikes are often just revenue-replacement for lost state funds. Attending school gets more expensive, but because of a cost-shift away from taxpayers towards tuition payers, not because the school actually gets any more money.

A way to net-out all those factors is to calculate the cost of college education using aggregate numbers: total budget of the university divided by number of students. By that measure, rather than doubling, at some universities the cost of higher education has actually declined. For example, the University of California system spends 25% less per student, in real terms, than it did in 1990. Tuitions have nonetheless gone up, mainly due to a massive (~40%) decline in per-student state funding, and secondarily due to an expansion of student aid meaning that the sticker-price tuition has diverged further from the average actually-paid tuition.

I think this is the solution for the top schools that have very rich people willing to pay full boat tuition and/or donate to the endowment.

State schools are still mostly affordable. The top 100-150 private schools (including both tech schools and private schools) can probably operate like the top schools. Many people go to them for their location, their campus, their athletics, etc.

But what should the 'lower tier' schools do? That's where the real problem is. They cost nearly the same but don't provide as much value. Rich people aren't lining up to go to East Crappy Value State University. So everyone has to pay much closer to sticker price - needy or not.

> While the sticker price college tuition has doubled, the proportion of students paying sticker price has declined, so tuition revenue has not doubled.

That only seems to be true at a few top private institutions. Which make up a very small percentage of overall college attendance.

Couldn't you adjust the income percentage such that the average earner ends up paying about what they do now under student loans? That way, they wouldn't have to count on the standouts footing the entire bill, and you'd have the added benefit of incentivizing profitable majors (assuming that's a worthy goal).

It seems that the author is proposing to take an equal portion from all college attendees seeking financial help as a percentage of future earnings above a certain baseline. In other words, if the baseline is $40k and I agreed to pay 10% above that for 15 years, then after attending college and making $60k per year for the next 15 years, I would pay out $2k per year over 15 years.

However, if I make $35k, I don't pay anything.

This is very different than what you are describing, which amounts to a progressive tax on the more successful students. If anything, it would be fair to put some sort of a max on the amount of income that could be counted. For example, if I'm expected to make $60k, but end up making $6 million due to some luck or whatever, it doesn't seem entirely fair to attribute 10% of that to just education...

I could see varying the % required by the "investor" based on some sort of merit-related valuation process, where the individuals most likely to be worth the investment are given a discount.

That "unfairness" is pretty inherent to the equity-style model in any area. I mean, you give someone 5% equity due to their role as an early employee, and your company quickly gets bought out for $500m due to some stroke of good fortune; is it really "fair" to attribute 5% of that to just this one employee? Probably not, but that's how equity-based models work.

If anything, equity at scale relies on outsized profits from a few big winners, which is why VCs play the probabilities by funding a bunch of fences-swinging startups. Perhaps university funding would be similar? Of course, if someone is sure they're going to get rich, they wouldn't sign on to giving a university a percentage of future income. But a lot of people who eventually got rich had no idea, at the time of going to college, that it was likely they would. Similar situation as startups, really: if you knew that you were a shoo-in for a multibillion IPO in the near future, you wouldn't give away nearly the equity that you normally do in venture rounds.

It doesn't really seem any more unfair to me that universities would get outsized profits from their equity share in a few big winners, than the same situation with venture capitalists getting outsized profits from their few big winners. In retrospect, you can always say that less than 10% of John Smith's success came from his university; but in retrospect, you can always say that less than 10% of a particular startup's success came from a particular Series A backer.