First problem: doesn't scale. This whole "college is obsolete" meme falls flat when we start to talk about scaling. Not everyone who's in college belongs there, but for at least 200-500 thousand people each year, it's the best thing for them. How are you going to scale up the Thiel Fellowship or "be Hilary Mason's protegee" to the number of people attending college?<p>Also, tuition is going up because admissions (at top universities) are becoming an insoluble problem. They're now (by their own admission) turning away 3-5 fully qualified applicants for every acceptance. There really is no good way to sort through the applications at this point; you pick away the obvious "yes" (1%) pile and the unqualified 25% or so, and then it's guesswork over the remaining 74. Tuition is just part of the selection process. It's horrible that many people, through no fault of their own, can't compete; but there it is. It's not that colleges are evil or "greedy" more than anyone else. It's just that they can charge ridiculous prices without a measurable decline in academic quality (because 17-year-olds just aren't that different, no matter what they're told). Not by intention, they ended up running a protection racket over the entire middle-class job market.<p>As much as these gold-plated apprenticeship programs might be a good idea-- I like the concept of getting people in the real world before they're 22-- I see them as political disasters, especially given how fucked the people born 1985-1992 have been. At some point, the 19-year-old protegee becomes a 20-year-old employee. How, exactly, is one going to make that work? If the Benefactor (e.g. Mason, not to pick on her but because the OP mentioned her) continues the relationship then (a) s/he's going to get overextended after a few years of that, and (b) the team will be sabotaged by resentful people who didn't get the "CxO's protege" track. If the Benefactor doesn't continue the relationship, then the jilted protege fails in the same way that jilted proteges always go down. Either they melt down (upset that the favoritism doesn't continue and they become "just another employee") or they are torn down in their time of weakness.<p>I'm glad I had a liberal arts, general education <i>because</i> there is so much instability in the world. College is expensive and inefficient, but I don't see a solution to that problem here. Sure, it might seem like a good move for an individual to drop college for a "CTO protege" program, but careers are long...