The expense of college, he notes, goes to cover what is of little importance. The valuable part is free:
Those conveniences which the student requires at Cambridge or elsewhere cost him or somebody else ten times as great a sacrifice of life as they would with proper management on both sides. Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made.
(Quoted from page 39 of Walden and “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau. Signet Classic, 1960.)
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