1. We need the students to be awarded a degree from some real institution. Thus to run the prototype we will need a partner university willing to support the idea and grant the degree. There are a few that I feel may be interested.
2. We are probably going to need to give potential students some sort of "guarantee" that they will have a job after this experience. Here is an idea Aaron came up with: At the beginning before the prototype begins, we get corporate sponsors. Companies who buy into the concept and agree to employ a student during internships and commit to employ the student full time for some period of years after their graduation. The point of this whole thing is to create a more-ready entry level engineer for industry. We will ask them to come to the table at the beginning to have ownership in the idea and commitment to the product.
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Here's some things to consider on your endeavor:
You should be careful. Corporate sponsors will be looking for some return to their investment (unless you can find some that truly care about the quality of engineering education). This return could be cheaper salaries for these "prototype" students upon graduation and hiring. You also need students to volunteer for this program, and the resultant lower salary won't be an incentive to do so. As a result, the sponsoring company might be paying not just for the prototype education, but also for the schooling (full ride) in order to recruit participants. Which is an entirely different situation. The participants (in order to form a valid experiment) should be a random population sample. You'll have to convince High School seniors to hop on board an EXPERIMENT for their education (ok maybe for a full ride), but also they'll be segregated for the rest of their engineering class and will probably either get the "special treatment" or the "stepchild treatment" from the faculty depending on the commitment and cooperation of the host university.
On an unrelated (but kind of related) topic, the test subject's prior education could play a large role in the success of the education and is probably the root of the reason that there are so many more successful engineers from Japan than from the US (aside from the population difference). Ultimately I hope that your reform can help to close this gap. An I am on board as a possible instructor, If I have my Master's Degree soon enough to participate.
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