Another thing we can add is sealing grades. If you can’t use your grades as a credential, the incentive to cheat is reduced. This won’t solve the relation between getting a job and living - that’s a job for UBI and a comprehensive social security system.
Free education and no grades with no business purpose already exists; it's called learning about things that interest you on your own time. I don't see why the taxpayer needs to pay for someone to do this.
No, I understand the point of it, I just don't think it is worth the tens of thousands per person that it would cost to do it. I could accept a value argument for free university education in some form, but that form would not be for gradeless/credentialless unproductive studies.
And it's not just that it would cost a lot, it's that it would cost a lot and a motivated person can already do a 90% job of it for free on their own.
That's the thing, like, there's not a whole hell of a lot I learned in Phil 201 that is directly applicable to my job, but, you know the class is valuable. I took art history in college. Turned into being one of the most important classes I ever took and I'm one of those stem major types.
Productivity shouldn't be the point of education - you get productivity indirectly out of the education and search for knowledge, but if we want more data plumbers (which is largely what most of the programming I do for money on a regular basis is), I don't think we necessarily need to make certain that college is paying for them.
I mean, think bigger - this new technology is going to be utterly transformative to our society and economic system. If we could actually approach some sort of reasonable post-scarcity world, what would we want it to be like? So, maybe there's grades, but it's "pass/fail" or something, but all of these metrics that we use to evaluate have become targets.
Maybe make them sealed? Or you’re only allowed to see your grade during the clads?
Regardless, I never found grades all that useful in college because I had so many classes where either there were like 3 tests and that was it? Or the homework was nothing like the tests.