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Phil's giving $100 bills to his students should be viewed independently from the notion of making MIT tuition free. Phil has selected a group of students that he feels will contribute something valuable to society (the ones interested in his lecture on) making database-backed web sites, and he's choosing to subsidize their education directly. Similarly, if companies or the government feel that a better engineer offers better value, they're better off subsidizing that engineer directly, perhaps before school through scholarships or better-yet after graduation through higher salaries (which can support borrowing to pay for tuition) and which will attract more students to engineering. This also has the effect of giving students the choice to attend the university that they believe offers them the best engineering degree for the money.While engineering salaries might not equal that for an orthopedic surgeon or McKinsey partner, they're overal...