GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

European colleges seem to be doing right in the sense that students often switch between schools depending on what they are studying at the time. The whole idea of "ranking" is very loose that they don't really care about what school you graduated from since a lot of knowledge is shared between them. Unlike in Asia where reputation is more important and within departments, there are a lot of politics based on reputation and funding.

I believe GaTech's Threads program is a great step in the right direction along with Penn State's school of IST.