If you are willing to stretch your distances, the University of Alabama in Huntsville is a good engineering school(not n aMIT or Georgia Tech) that is collocated with a lot of space and missile companies. By going to UAH you can do Co-ops and internships with NASA, Army Missile and Space Command, Space X, and others. Almost every US space and missile company has a presence in Huntsville Alabama and takes students from UAH.

Your not paying just for the knowledge, your paying for a trusted authority to certify that you have that knowledge. Yes, anybody can learn from khan academy, but how can a third party (i.e. a potential employer) be sure you're telling the truth? The certification is valuable and thus it is sold.

I don't agree with you. Moving a child from a poor performing school to a high performing will definitely help the child. A full voucher system wouldn't require moving children often. Parents do the research, put their child in the school that they think is best, and the school that nobody wants to go to will get better or go away. One of the best ways to improve the performance of any group is to get rid of the lowest performers.

As others have pointed out, The 100 and 200 level lecture hall classes aren't any better than online. A 400 level 20 student class probably shouldn't be online. The 300 student Western Civ class, what do you loose by going online?

You forgot to ask, who should decide what the person gets educated in. If society is paying all the bills because of the benefit to society, doesn't that lead to society dictating what the individual learns? Just because some person is interested in the lives of middle ages prostitutes doesn't mean society should foot the bill if society needs more engineers.

Anything that isn't quantifiable is an open invitation to discrimination lawsuits.

Private people have been building these for DEFCON for a couple of years. This technology is out in the open for anyone who wants to look up the presentations.

Your job sounds interesting. I actually like the calculation. Where do I send the resume?

Unless you in the rare position of being able to complete a double major in the same amount of time as a single major, your probably better off getting a BS and the an MS.

They will then transfer for the last two to a university with a brand name. I respectfully disagree, I don't believe re-proving centuries ago established facts provides anything of worth. I believe that universities are going to move, despite their best efforts, to a 2+2 model. As tuition continues to climb students are going to take the first two years at community colleges and/or online classes. What labs do do is create excuses to deny transfer credits. You might have taken a 4 credit class including the lab, but here the lab is separate so you need to pay us to do it again.