I think it could possibly work in a financially neutral way if the school contracted the students (as either skilled or unskilled labor) out to local businesses

I think it could possibly work in a financially neutral way if the school contracted the students (as either skilled or unskilled labor) out to local businesses. There'd be a lot of ethical considerations around how to establish a relationship between the students, the school, and the businesses where everyone is getting a good deal and the students are protected from being exploited (however one defines the term). I have a roommate who went to a sort of coding school where they take in random people who score well on a general aptitude test and they agree to work for the company a couple of years as IT contractors in exchange for free training. (If memory serves, the first few weeks of training is unpaid, but the later part of their training they do get paid.) After training, the students get paid less than market wages, but the expectation is that they'll leave and get a much better job elsewhere and it's better to get paid less that market wages as an IT person than a lot of other low-skill jobs people might find themselves doing instead. Kind of a weird system, but it seemed to work out well for him. I went a different route post-college, which was to become a grad student. Our department financed mostly through federal grants to do basic research in computer science. For certain fields this can work pretty well, as long as the grant funding is stable. (In our case it wasn't. But for a while I got paid to be a student, which was a nice reversal of the usual trend.)