The instructor is also much cheaper at an elementary school than for collage classes especially programming classes.

An average 100,000$/year including benefits professor works out to a ~75k/year salary. Teaching 16 credits per semester to an average class size of 25 starts at 4,000$ per year per student. That does not cover building, supplies, administrative or technical support, advertising etc.

But the instructor only needs to be part time and class sizes can be raised to something like 50 without compromising the quality much vs 25. A detailed technical education can be achieved with 13 hours a week in contact hours so you can divide the salary by ~3 compared to 40 hour work week.

> That does not cover building, supplies, administrative or technical support, advertising etc.

A building is mandatory I'll grant you that; but maybe skip the advertising, downplay the admin and go light on the supplies. They invented calculus without anything much more impressive than pen and paper; there is a limit to how many toys are needed. Everyone can bring their own laptop.

People won't be bragging about it to their millionaire friends but it would be cheap and they'd learn enough to do hard jobs. It wouldn't be feasible to do Real Science where lab-work is required, but it'd work a treat for maths, engineering, arts and social sciences which are more about reading papers, talking to people and in extreme cases doing maths.

The 'teaching' is overrated, the value of university is in the controlled assessment environment. That can be replicated for a few thousand each with a few tens of students.

That would make the teacher completely unavailable for grading assignments, answering student questions outside of class, or much of anything beyond simply speaking to students. Someone needs to read all those history essay questions on the test, and then change something when most students get something wrong.

A 50+ person class would similarly limit students from asking questions. At which point you might as well just show videos. Some introductory classes are taught in huge auditorium’s but they still require additional TA’s and don’t work for upper level classes.

Don’t get me wrong, you could simply have an online system with canned videos, multiple choice question tests, and zero ability to ask questions. But, that’s not a collage education.

The core of my argument is that local populations demand those things. High schools didn't start building football stadiums for fun, it was because of local pressures. If you fight that group on this topic, you'll find they will reference a million and one articles showing that sports and music improve student outcomes. Most of those studies and articles have the academic rigor you'd expect of a layperson, but they're convincing enough that they make the case 'think of the children!'

They definitely are not necessary for a quality education outcome. They are, basically, a product of democracy working against the best interest of the people.

*Still, the primary cost drivers are all the other things I referenced. Sports and extra-curricular activities are just one item on the list. The dynamic at the university level is very different. I was only describing the cost of education up to that level, as it demonstrates the cost of actually getting a student to university.