Like housing, we have decided that education is for profit and this is where it goes.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

One letter to a newly admitted Vanderbilt University engineering student showed an all-in price — room, board, personal expenses, a high-octane laptop — of $98,426.

“The gap between the price and cost of attendance is funded by our endowment and the generous philanthropy of donors and alumni,” Brett Sweet, vice chancellor for finance, said in an emailed statement.

Similarly, families in a free market can make alternative choices if they want fewer mental health practitioners and their bosses, computer network administrators, academic advisers or career counselors.

“You could get an engineering degree at a state flagship university that’s just as valuable as something you’d get at Vanderbilt,” said Julian Treves, a financial adviser and college specialist whose newsletter tipped me off to the goings-on there.

“We are committed to excellence at all levels, from the quality of our faculty, programming, facilities and research labs to the services we provide to support the academic, emotional and social well-being of our students,” went the statement.

Without publicly available, industrywide quantitative data on quality — happiness scores, customer satisfaction, measures of learning, return on friendship, the strength of career networks — the list price alone serves as a signal of excellence, to some shoppers at least.

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