This is replacing student debt with student equity.

Here's some thought on debt and equity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modigliani%E2%80%93Miller_theo...

AKA the "capital structure irrelevance principle."

My thoughts for some reason wandered that way, but I was actually going to address another issue: as long as it's expensive to go to college, you can't win. There's no free lunch. If college were cheap, you could spend a few years improving your future earnings. If it's fairly priced, you can't. It's as if everyone will be trapped by efficiency, though I haven't quite fleshed this out in my mind.

Of course college is not the only thing there is, but it's a fairly big aspiration for a fairly large chunk of the population.