1. The typical student experience in higher-ed is poor
2. Students pay a lot of money for it
3. The experience is poor because incentives in higher-ed are mostly towards research and not teaching
As for whether students get value for their money, I'm not sure what to say other than I don't believe it should cost $12k to provide 250 hours of instruction, especially when it's done en mass.
I also strongly disagree that it takes anything extraordinary to teach calc 3 or intro real analysis. Everything up to 3rd year is relatively trivial, and I don't find it hard to believe that a bright PhD that loves teaching wouldn't be able to do a decent job at it.
If you want a school where the professor's highest priority is the classroom experience go to a small liberal arts school. But frankly, there's no reason a great professor can't do both so you may as well go somewhere with the resources to conduct interesting research.
1. This is an assertion. During 11+ years in academia, I saw no evidence that "typical" students were unhappy with quality of the education.
2. Yes, college costs a lot. We disagree on the reasons.
3. I agree that the incentives are biased toward research, but disagree that this leads to a poor student experience.
As for the $12k for 250 hours of instruction: yes, that's $50 an hour, per student. But you're not just paying the instructor of the course (believe me!) -- you're paying for the classroom, the building, the fancy new student center, the campus landscaping, the fountains, the climbing wall, the professors who are teaching dozens of other, very small courses, the laboratory space, the dormitories, the third-party software licenses, the women's softball team, etc.
Universities aren't cheap to run. The guy at the front of the classroom is only the start of the cost structure.
Also, I imagine you didn't go to a state school.
There are many reasons why schools have become more expensive over the years. The cost of health care, alone, is growing much faster than the rate of inflation.
But honestly, most universities went on a building spree over the last twenty years. Fancy dorms and labs and classrooms and athletic facilities really start to add up -- and grants rarely pay for them. As I said before, there are tons of inefficiencies in the university system. I just don't think they're in the classroom.
If that was your thesis (it was well-buried), then yes, I disagree with it. And I can fairly conclusively prove my point with your own words: professors spend most of their time raising money to do their research. They don't do that because the school is showering them with cash (in point of fact, the school takes a substantial percentage cut from every grant dollar, too). So where is the tuition going? It sure isn't going to the research programs.
If you're going to make the claim that universities are squandering student tuition/fees (and that IS what you're doing here, even if you're doing it obliquely), you're going to have to defend that claim with more than just hand-waving assertions that students would gain just as much from private tutors. Because that's not a claim that stands up to casual scrutiny.
Honestly, I think you're succumbing to the fallacy of the university as a provider of first-year coursework. Yes, some students could probably learn calculus 101 from private tutors. But most of the people qualified to "tutor" students in anything more complex than first-year coursework are already doing so -- at universities.
I'm open to a frank discussion of inefficiencies in the university system (and I think there are tons -- what's the average student-contact-hour rating of a professor in comparative lit, versus a first-year professor in chemistry or math? How much does that new dorm cost? What about the Taj Mahal gym with the fancy climbing walls?), but it's wrong to suggest that the whole institution is "absurdly" overpriced from the teaching perspective. The numbers just don't bear out that hypothesis.