Is part of her benefit the name of the institution? I doubt many people have even heard of Macalester. The quality of the faculty and the student body? You betcha!
That's right. I am just questioning the amount of tuition fees one has to pay. In the US it is more than ten times the amount European students have to pay. In case of theoretical physics, you really don't need to spend more than 1000 dollars to learn the entire curriculum taught at university (I'm not counting the living costs). But this is assuming you could learn everything by yourself from books and lecture notes.
But students at university end up learning most of the stuff themselves anyway. The tuition they get only amounts to a Prof. lecturing a bit which is just superficial guidance and thus a waste of time and money. The problem sessions, usually supervised by Ph.D. students, are more important but there is no reason why you couldn't do the exercises yourself at home.
The only labor intensive work per student is checking homework and exams. I don't count prepairing for lectures, because that is not a lot of work per student. You don't get anywhere near the current US tuition fees if students were charged with the work that is actually performed for them.
