I'm reminded of a couple of students at a German university last year who studied all the material by dividing up the classes between them and exchanging notes, took all the exams, and passed in a few months. The university then turned around and sued them for studying too fast.

http://www.thelocal.de/education/20120703-43517.html

It is not in a University's interests to do a good job. It's like any other company: The aim is to extract the most $$$ from you while they give up the least value in return.

In highly competitive markets this leads to fairly marginal profits. But formal education is not a competitive market. Not at all. Very tightly regulated.

The competition for education comes almost entirely around costs for most people. They view education as an expense, not as an investment - which is quite reasonable when you consider the likely quality they're going to get - and aim to minimise that expense. Offer people a better education and the majority of them won't be willing to pay much for it, offer them a cheaper education though, or a faster one - which amounts to more or less the same thing....

That's the financial side of things anyway, and one of the reasons I think your idea's just never going to happen.

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One would determine what to learn based on statistical studies of what elements are, by and large, most desired by employers of/predictors of professional success in a certain field you want to work in.

1. I don't know, but I wouldn't think this data's going to be available or reliable. Google did their own research on this, which suggests to me that the data wasn't available when they looked for it elsewhere. One thing's just that everyone's going to record things slightly differently - there's not an industry standard for measuring this sort of stuff that I'm aware of. The other is that most places are not particularly rational about their HR procedures - there are a set of skills that go into even the basic recording of data that I'd not expect them to have. I'd expect it to be more like they sit there with a sheet of paper that they're marking 1-10 based on their subjective opinion of your answer to a question. That's probably the extent of any data most people will be expected to generate and, perhaps, keep.

In the case of desired by employers I suspect you might find the data was actually contradictory to predictors of success a lot of the time too. I know, when I go for interviews, I tone down a lot of the qualities that let me do things easily - the corollary of don't dress better than the boss is don't act smarter/more skilled than the boss - most people like to hire people they can use as tools for their own success, not colleagues who they have to work with. Especially considering lots of economic behaviour seems to be self-justifying/rent-seeking.

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That said, I would imagine that what you really want to do is to follow up with people who've left university, both those who won and those who lost, and ask them what they wish they'd known then that they know now. Certainly, a few years out of the gate, I could give my university a great deal of feedback.

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2 . The incentives in HR seem to be to be risk averse. To find reasons not to take people on. If you hire someone and they do really well then you don't get rewarded, whereas if you hire someone and they're awful then your job is at risk. If that's heavily weighted in the decision maker's consideration, then giving people more granular data will result in dramatically fewer hires, since the probability of a concurrent set of criteria being fulfilled is the multiple of its individual probabilities. Even if the individual probabilities are quite high, HR managers will be able to talk their way into using a great number of individual criteria and then you'll be hung.

3 . It makes the market more competitive, not necessarily in a good way. Students take on a great deal of the financial risk in education these days. Which honestly seems the wrong way around, but there you go. If rich people can afford to grind their way higher up the tech tree, then you're essentially pricing poor people out of the market. The rich person only has to be ahead by one or two points - you're probably going to pick someone who's even slightly better on paper over someone worse. So there's an incentive to have large steps in your pricing.