I walked away from MIT a long time ago. Can't begin to calculate what that cost in my field. Less than my soul, I'm pretty sure.
I know what you mean. I'm in the process of trying to set myself up to exit the pharmaceutical industry on my terms, rather than it leaving me when it all ends up going over to India or China.
I kinda think that we need to "go Galt" on the current higher education system, with its emphasis on getting a piece of paper to serve as a "credential," but which often times fails to really, truly educate young people beyond the "memorise this, and regurgitate it on the test" mentality.
Of course, a lot of the groundwork for that failure is lain in the public secondary education system....
What I would love to see is a system based more on actual merit, one where businesses stop looking for whether a potential new hire has a piece of paper from a diploma mill, and start looking to see what actual skills and qualifications the applicant has. I'd even go for a strictly "class" based system, where your higher education consists of taking specific courses, not to fill a curricula and graduate with enough electives to get that paper passport, but to actually build up a valuable skill set that would actually be useful in the real world.
You can't imagine how many graduates in the sciences that I have encountered over the years - including a fair number of Ph.Ds - have been putzes who were in way over their heads.
Keep in mind - all this that I am writing is not "sour grapes" by someone who never went to school, or went to a rinky-dink fifth tier no-name school, and is jealous of those who went to "better schools." My graduate level degree in chemistry is from one of the top-ten ranked graduate programs in the country.
Gluck.