As an English professor, I taught first-year writing courses for decades, but I liked to do a little math with my students each semester too. I'd ask the class, "How much does a credit hour of tuition cost you?" In recent years, if the class members had any doubt, I'd invite them to haul out their cell phones and look it up. They were attending a moderately priced regional campus of the state university system.
Sometimes the math was do-it-in-your-head easy. The year I retired, a credit hour of tuition ran to about $100 for long-time residents of the state. An undergraduate degree was at least 120 credit hours. Let's put aside the cost of books, housing, transportation, interest on student loans, and any student fees for now and say the degree was going to cost nearly everyone in the room $12,000.
The math portion of our semester was over. My next question would be: "So, as a full-time or part-time student, in four, five, six years from now you'll put on those graduation robes and walk across the stage. The President of the university will shake your hand. Friends and family in the auditorium will make their presence heard by all in attendance. On that day, diploma in hand, you'll have a stronger resume. But I ask you, Do you want to walk across that stage with exactly the same brain you have today, in your first weeks of college? Or do you want to be a changed person, with a changed brain, with lots of new things going on in your thinking, resources, skills, body of facts and terms, methods of analyzing, an improved sense of when to question and doubt what you've heard? Are you hoping for a new you?"
Before I asked for their answers, I'd say, "Sure, school is sometimes strange, boring, alien. Not every teacher is as good as the best ones. You have a life, one or more jobs, friends and even family, and some days you'll be tired and you won't feel like studying, writing, or even driving to campus. Nevertheless, on graduation day, do you want the brain you walk in with or a better one that you put in the work to fashion for yourself with the help of good teacher, bodies of knowledge passed down for generations, classmates who dig into serious conversations with you, and the delayed gratification that goes with asking tough questions? What's your answer? What'll it be?"
Nobody in those class sessions ever admitted to wanting to walk across the graduation stage unchanged. Nobody ever said, "I like the narrowness of my life, my knowledge, my experience."
In our country today, there are lots of people, including powerful political leaders, who don't trust young people to answer that kind of question for themselves.