An Ideal Form

Imagine a stratified payment system to attend college where pay goes up based on what you've successfully mastered depending on what that might be, for example... computer science and physics will probably be more valuable in the grand scheme of things than say basket weaving. If there was a DIRECT INCENTIVE to learn, there would be a much more educated population, which is what drives art and promotes true infinite growth, instead of the thing we have right now.

My devils advocate pops up and says, "That's great Jacob, but how are we going to pay for all of this?  Until you figure out how that's going to work, its nothing but a pipe dream."

That's certainly a good objection to make, however when you take an HONEST look at how finances work, it might not be such a huge issue, however I'll take your challenge and give you all of the capital you might need.  If the government is the only real player that might be able to initiate a national minimum wage for students to learn (which I do not believe is true, but unfortunately the probability of the larger private players doing this is sufficiently less) then it should be the government who automates, taking the revenue that is gained by the automated services, and put it towards creating real value in the world which would be educating people to where they could ACTUALLY contribute (occupations like technical, artistic, social, management, etc).

My devils advocate pops up again and says, "That's great Jacob, but I'm older and done with school, why would I care that students get this deal when I didn't and when this wont effect me at all?"

It's not true that you wouldn't be effected by supporting this effort.  Instead of paying people to work at occupations that don't need to exist anymore, even if you yourself have an occupation that can't be automated yet, discounting those wasted resources is an oversight.  Businesses would see a completely new standard, the growth and innovation would be 'unimaginable' right now. Say you're someone that doesn't own a business, but still has a white collar job and you're relatively comfortable with how life treats you and you're hesitant to shake things up knowing how hard it was to get where you are.  It's certainly something that is understandable, however we're in a loop as a society right now where things that were vital to our survival in the past that demanded a significant portion of the population no longer require the same concentrated effort, but still have their hold on society.  If we were able to break out of this loop, some of the larger dreams people once worked towards, like SPACE, might not be so foolish to dream about again.  The assertion is that those dreams will never come about without eventually breaking out of this loop, so why not sooner rather than later.

My devils advocate pops up once more and says, "That's great Jacob, however I'm retired and getting into my 60's, 70's and 80's, why would I care about your little scheme?"

Medical Science.  The life prolonging technologies and medicines we've come up with, (which is why we don't die at the ripe old age of 30 anymore) will certainly see significant growth with this scenario since those sorts of applications and occupations would still be in very high demand and provide their incentives for people to contribute to, which is something someone who is older would care about even if they weren't interested in living past 100 (which you probably could do if you wanted to try).  These sorts of advances would still make the last years of someone's life as comfortable as they 'could be' as opposed to what they would be if our human resources were wasted.