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I ask myself if 8 classes over the course of 8 months, a shared dorm room and some institutional food are really worth $60,000. I ask myself if an equivalent education can be had for less (say, in Europe or Canada). My husband and I both attended colleges and universities in Europe for next to nothing. We both got excellent educations and we're both very employable.

We did sit in on a class that the course adviser had suggested in his e-mail. It had about 50 students in a classroom that would seat about three times that many, and neither the professor nor the TA were there. The lecture was given by an undergraduate section leader, who did a pretty good job of explaining how operator overloading in C++ is done (though he made a lot of typos in his live demos, and he used a black background with lights shining on the projection screen, so his example text was a little hard to read due to unacceptably low contrast). My son learned one or two things from the lecture, and decided that he’d be better off learning C++ on his own over the summer, rather than taking such a course.