I think I'd be in favor of both ideas. Much has been made of employers, particularly those in high tech, simply not being able to get enough highly qualified people to man the facilities they'd like to have here in the U.S. I can recall Bill Gates saying that they definitely wanted to build or expand a Microsoft facility in the Pacific Northwest, but found they had to place the new facility less than 200 miles north in Canada because they could get the highly educated people they needed there. The people they hired there weren't necessarily all Canadians but Canada has a much more liberal visa policy, thereby permitting many of the foreign students who had come to North America to be educated to stay and work in Canada.

One of the most logical suggestions I ever heard came from Tom Friedman in one of his New York Times columns a year or so ago. He noted that at his daughter's graduation from Cornell, virtually every single doctoral graduate in math and the sciences were foreign students. (I've noticed the same thing when my sons graduated from the University of Michigan.) He suggested that the Immigration Service have a representative at the commencement ceremonies of all the top U.S. engineering and science schools, who would simply hand all those new Phd's either a permanent visa or a passport accepting them as U.S. citizens when they came down the stairs with their new technical doctoral degrees. He suggested that the "brain drain" so long a complaint of U.S. companies, could be solved permanently and very quickly with that approach.

As far as companies using a "military academy" approach, educating and then employing students, I don't see much wrong with that either. It sure works for our military. The military has both the service academies as well as the ROTC programs, which pay for all or a big part of the education of future officers. I was an Army ROTC officer and I couldn't have made it through college without that monthly check from the Army. In order to complete my degree in Industrial Engineering, I was happy with the trade off of a couple years of active duty and another six years of weekly meetings and two-week summer encampments in the active reserve.

That doesn't mean employers would offer an education-for-future employment deal to everyone, any more than our military does. Both the service academies as well as the ROTC programs are pretty doggone selective with the academic credentials they require for those they accept into those programs. The same could be true for companies seeking engineers, scientists, mathemeticians, etc. Hire the brightest, pay to educate them, and then give them a good job when they've completed their education. A good deal for them as well as the employers.

If you think about it, the G.I. Bill worked awfully well in educating a whole generation of people who accomplished some pretty fantastic things. So much so that they're now called "the greatest generation". Does anyone have an expectation that our current younger generation will ever be so respected as to be called something like that?