Get medieval on education...

Medieval universities, although structured to some degree by charters and royal or clerical authority, were far less tightly-structured than modern universities. In most cases, the students determined who would be able to give lectures. If a particular scholar had a sufficiently good reputation, students might commission that scholar to teach a class. Terrible teachers did not get many students, and thus received little or no income.

I think that this model of education has a great deal to recommend it. What student would actually want to take a class from a bored senior faculty member going through the motions in order to meet his or her nominal teaching obligations? Leading scholars might attract more students, who would be drawn in by the force of towering academic reputations. Other, younger, scholars might focus entirely on the teaching side of academia, and the best and most interesting among them would attract more students, and attract students willing to pay a premium.

For a system like this to work, two of the functions served by modern universities need to be separated. Currently, universities both instruct and evaluate the quality of instruction. This is a system that's just simply built to fail. Students, faculty members, and administrators all have an incentive to wink, nod, and pretend that education is working just fine, thanks, regardless of what is actually taking place in the classroom. As a result, the grades given by universities are not very good at conveying information, and students are rarely pushed terribly hard in their classes.

I'd be very interested to see the credential-giving and evaluation functions of modern universities spun off into different entities. We do this to some extent already in the professional fields, with medical boards, professional engineering exams, and bar exams. Credentialing agencies, when independent, would have a real interest in making sure that anyone who received their credentials had actually earned them - they'd have no product to sell apart from their ability to accurately convey real knowledge about the skills and training that particular students had accrued.

Students could learn in any way that they wished, whether from books, youtube, ancient meditation techniques or from paid educators. All of the messy structures such as departments, programs, majors, and the like, as well as most of the administrative side of a typical university would no longer be necessary. If students didn't feel that they were getting good educational value for their dollars, they could walk out of class, study using other teachers or resources, and obtain certifications regardless. In this system, students would have an incentive to seek out demanding (but skillful) instructors, since there would be a real advantage to putting in more work. And, in most cases, students would pay far, far less money for an education. (In a typical university, between 1 and 5 students are enough to pay the salary of the professor leading the class... so students could get together with a few friends and each pay 3000 dollars for a very small class, or get together with a larger group of 20 or so colleagues, and pay a few hundred dollars per course. Either would be an improvement, in cost and quality of instruction, over the current system.