In short, my answer is this: I intend to donate as much as I can to help
others have a similar experience and will not think twice about paying for
my own children to get a similar education. I will work 3 jobs if necessary
to expose them to this environment.

I realize not everyone shares this sentiment, however, so one of the items
on my startup-todolist is an education company, focused on making this sort
of experience more affordable. Prolly will be in five-ten years, though–my
plate is pretty full right now. Education is definitely an area I will
return to however. As a citizen of a democracy, I feel obligated to
contribute to improving education as an educated populace is the only way
for a true democratic society to sustain and improve itself.

Have you seen any sort of startups making this caliber of experience more
accessible? The closest thing I have seen is Youtube, but that does not have
the same sort of ubiquitous learning (learning at the cafeteria and gym)
sort of effects.

I hear you on ROI, however, Andy. The value to me of the university
education is in the intangibles. When you go off to university, you leave
your comfort zone and family behind, and move geographically. Campus is a
place where excitement about learning lives. When you go to the dining hall
or gym, you're surrounding by people who are eager to learn and constantly
engaging in discussion with people who are learning new things outside your
domain. It's very tough to duplicate the motivation to learn that results
from living 24×7 in this kind of environment. Sure, you can join meetups and
forums and youtube channels focuses on learning a specific topic, but I have
yet to see the geographic network effects of a college campus duplicated
online.

The closest thing I have seen, actually, is New York City, where everyone
has a story. Everyone is excited about something, has some sort of telos.
Bartenders stories are about their theatre groups or art shows,
entrepreneurs abound, and generally people are excited about something,
looking for opportunities, ready to learn from the rest of the diverse
population. Building cities like this or figuring out how to translate this
environment to the web, I think, are the only way to compete with college
campus education.

Re the replacement of Steve Jobs – where I disagree is that you would lead to see what someone DID, how they PERFORMED, well before you looked at their course of study

Yes, if I was looking for a new developer (ie. someone with a specific skillset) I would look for someone trained in those skills. However, if I was looking to replace Steve Jobs, an industry-moulding destructive force of creativity (who lest we forget, has assigned much of the creative inspiration for the original Apple's to the various liberal arts courses, including calligraphy, that he dropped in on) I might look for someone with a broader range of study than the specialization undoubtedly so useful for other roles.

Finally, it's instructive to see how CEOs from various specific backgrounds react to challenges and setbacks. The former marketing guy looks to a marketing solution, the former product guy tries to solve the problem through new product strategy, the former biz dev guy through new deals and distribution channels. Being able to rely on people highly-skilled in a specific areas (with the skillz to pay the billz as you say) is useful, but an effective leader should be aware of the entire toolset and then exploit each of these different people's skillsets to derive advantage.

The question is the ROI of a liberal arts education. Of course if has value, but what is that value relative to its cost. What is the return.

And can't all the attributs you and Kortina mention – intution, argument, analysis – they are not domains exclusive to liberal arts education, but to life. Sure they are enhanced at Harvard Penn wherever, but at what cost (well we know the cost, 50k a year).

When you need a new developer for Twitterfeed or Venmo, you are going to look first and foremost for someone with PHP, or Perl, or mysql or whatever skills. You arent looking for someone with a major in military history, to the exent education even comes up (christ, I dont even know where or if you went to school).

I submit we are in a country where we need to build and produce things, and liberal arts education and the bloat of universities has failed to deliver that.