Originally Posted by Val
Education is supposed to be about exposing a student to important ideas and getting him to really think about the world around him.

If that is the primary purpose, then taking 4 years and paying anywhere from $100K - $250K is an expensive way of doing it in terms of both time and money.

A typical college student may take about 15 hours per semester, and classes will meet for ~16 weeks each semester. That's 480 hours of instruction per year, which if I am doing my math correctly is $52 - $130 per hour of instruction. If it was just about learning to think, I could very easily pair up my children with a few other gifted children and pay talented individual teachers to teach our select group in depth and at a faster clip. They might get more out of that in a year than in 4 years at many universities.

But college has never been about just learning to think. An important part is that a college degree serves as an immediate external signal as to either intelligence (Stanford, Amherst, U. of Chicago, etc.), marketable skills (engineering, CS, business, etc.), or both (e.g. engineering at CalTech).