As Prof. Hanson would say, money is far; a stereo is near. The effectiveness of the article's proposal comes from bringing both the goods into a near frame of reference. In the case of college, this means bringing both money and the college experience into near mode. Then we can make tradeoffs.
Yea. TBH the (paid) higher education always struck me as some sort of weird scam scheme along the lines of printing some fancy pieces of paper which cost not so much and getting something valuable for them. For same money one pays to sit in a giant auditorium, one can pool together with 10 people, rent an office, and pay higher wage to the professors (whom will be doing part time gigs between different such offices inside one big office complex), getting far better value.
That's why I see education as to significant extent exchange of one kind of shredded paper for another kind of shredded paper. edit: well and also people are too meek and weak willed to pull the 'rent the office, hire professors as consultants' approach.
Or there may be a curious failure in the brain whereby one can easily exchange one kind of shredded paper (money) for another kind of shredded paper (diplomas), just as long as that other kind of shredded paper is scarce; when enough people are falling for that, the second kind of shredded paper acquires value like a self self-fulfilling prophesy. Yet someone has got something real and useful for making shredded paper. If i ever get famous i'll start selling signatures, starting at 100$, and increasing by factor of 1.1 every time i make another signature.
Money is not fungible inside the human brain. The sort of money we spend on a house isn't the same sort of money we spend on food.
It's the same sort of money, thought of in multiple conflicting ways. This is a problem, a map distorted.
Seth Godin has an article about how to translate monetary values into something intuitively commensurable with the thing you're buying:
Making Big Decisions about Money
The conclusion:
If you go to the free school, you can drive there in a brand new Mini convertible, and every summer you can spend $25,000 on a top-of-the-line internship/experience, and you can create a jazz series and pay your favorite musicians to come to campus to play for you and your fifty coolest friends, and you can have Herbie Hancock give you piano lessons and you can still have enough money left over to live without debt for a year after you graduate while you look for the perfect gig...
Suddenly, you're not comparing "this is my dream," with a number that means very little. You're comparing one version of your dream with another version.