Meh - doubling capacity is so last century. Look at optical media - just by punching a hole in the middle you go from zero useful storage to a lot!

P.S. Ok, so I punched a hole in my Bards Tale character disk so my sister could have her own side (and not screw up my stuff).

Nah - there's a process called a hazard analysis that should reveal the potential hazards of what somebody is doing. Why these aren't performed at an academic institution is a separate problem. The problem in academic institutions which doesn't exist in either corporate or government research labs is a lack of line management responsibility. The university culture generally allows for throwing a professor (or even a department) under the bus when something goes wrong and OSHA has allowed them to get away with it. In other areas it's been pretty clearly demonstrated that line management is responsible for safety.

For example look at NIST Boulder's plutonium incident - the director of the entire facility is who lost the job because it was his responsibility to have a lab safety program that was sufficient and effective. What is only just starting to wake up academic institutions is the fatal UCLA lab fire which the university was able to plead out of criminal charges, but the professor in charge has not. While the university had some pretty stiff penalties as part of the plea bargain - all of the accountability has come down on the professor and not the university management chain (i.e. with the criminal charges against the university, it should have landed at least at the VP level). I don't think universities will actually foster a safety culture until core administration accepts that the responsibility for doing so is theirs - and this is not likely to happen as long as a professor can be thrown under the bus (whether or not he or she deserves it) and administration escapes major personal (as opposed to institutional) penalties.

Hmm... I think the most important part of funding education in this manner is to link programs or schools (possibly even the college level) to the degree taxed. This would have the intrinsic effect for limiting the degree program to the employment base that will be able to utilize those jobs. The reciprocal funding should then be able to manage gradual changes in employment demand - and large demand shifts could be funded through government or corporate "scholarships" which would be in effect a future tax credit. You could also allow for traditional payment for those who wish to make it through school without future tax burdens (i.e. I had zero debt at the end of my degrees - a combination of scholarship and work).

As a more critical immediate reform for education funding/loans, I think there should be a loan cap based on some multiple of the average yearly income expected for that degree (and that multiple shouldn't necessarily be greater than one). I think it's borderline criminal to allow young kids to pursue a degree while simultaneously loaning them money that you know will be many times their expected annual income - and then making sure that there's no way out of that debt - not even bankruptcy.

It appears that using Google can be harder than you thought. It seems that you have to ask a question to get an answer - such as "what is the average cost of adoption?". It's about $30K for a domestic US adoption BTW, and that doesn't include the "false starts" where an adoption falls through part way through the process. Or providing siblings. I guess these guys didn't think to ask Google (or a lawyer) "would the state override what seems to us a perfectly legal and sensible contract"? Should there have been a lawyer, well I guess that depends on your perspective for interpreting "should".

You appear to have found one of the government solutions to the problem of matching kids who really really need parents to parents who really really want a kid - they give a loan for 10% of the cost. Classic. (Yes I know there's sometimes other benefits from other sources to help out - but they don't always pan out either and the process is long, hard, and usually involves a few heartbreaks along the way).