I think part of your disagreement is that the original poster is from the UK and you're talking about US education. The systems are similar, but subtly different enough to cause talking past one another.
In the UK you don't pick universities based on price. The government imposes price controls on higher education and (as far as I know) ~all universities charge the maximum amount. Whenever the caps rise, they all raise their prices to the new caps simultaneously. So in effect universities do not compete on price, only on reputation. Students therefore all attempt to get into the "best" universities as determined by basically unchanging perceptions of reputation that exist on a global rather than per-subject level, and the admissions system ends up allocating people based on grades.
So your point about there being a healthy market isn't really on point. For the OP, there simply is no market.
As an additional point, in recent times there has been absolutely massive rises in the price caps and therefore prices. When I went to university it cost me about 10,000 GBP in total. The year I graduated the professors all went on a kind of pseudo-strike where they refused to mark exams (but they still did research and they still got paid their full salary). The strike was because the government had tripled the price caps in order to try and boost capacity, and the staff decided they wanted to keep capacity the same and all get a pay rise instead. Their strike was successful, the (unbelievably weak) administration caved and the entire tripling of their income was immediately passed straight through to higher pay.
The OP claims he paid around 60,000 (about $100k). This sounds plausible to me if it includes costs of living as well. This is a lot of money by anyone's standards, especially compared to the recent past when it was a lot cheaper.
So I sympathise with 1971genocide. I too went through the UK universities system, studying computer science, and had exactly the same frustrations. I went to a university that is considered to be in the tier just below Oxbridge, many of the students there were from very rich families. The universities reputation is good. Yet the staff were incompetent to a degree that was truly mind blowing. Very few of the people who graduated actually became software engineers full time (many went into e.g. generic consulting roles, consultancies, finance), partly because so many people graduated entirely unable to write even basic programs. Many who studied soft subjects there ended up in dead end jobs earning too little to even begin paying back their student loans.
Looking back, I probably should have skipped university. It made me miserable too, and I got a job offer (from Google) before graduating there based on open source work I'd done. If I had gone straight into a job from 18 I'd have probably been much happier and healthier in those years.
Fair enough, I could understand it is a local problem. This web site (http://www.topuniversities.com/student-info/student-finance/...) talks about the costs and points out that many UK schools have 3 year programs rather than the 4 (or 5) year programs in the US. Sort of minimal variation with the limits imposed by the government.
It helps me understand why UK residents come to the US for their college study as well.
In the UK you don't pick universities based on price. The government imposes price controls on higher education and (as far as I know) ~all universities charge the maximum amount. Whenever the caps rise, they all raise their prices to the new caps simultaneously. So in effect universities do not compete on price, only on reputation. Students therefore all attempt to get into the "best" universities as determined by basically unchanging perceptions of reputation that exist on a global rather than per-subject level, and the admissions system ends up allocating people based on grades.
So your point about there being a healthy market isn't really on point. For the OP, there simply is no market.
As an additional point, in recent times there has been absolutely massive rises in the price caps and therefore prices. When I went to university it cost me about 10,000 GBP in total. The year I graduated the professors all went on a kind of pseudo-strike where they refused to mark exams (but they still did research and they still got paid their full salary). The strike was because the government had tripled the price caps in order to try and boost capacity, and the staff decided they wanted to keep capacity the same and all get a pay rise instead. Their strike was successful, the (unbelievably weak) administration caved and the entire tripling of their income was immediately passed straight through to higher pay.
The OP claims he paid around 60,000 (about $100k). This sounds plausible to me if it includes costs of living as well. This is a lot of money by anyone's standards, especially compared to the recent past when it was a lot cheaper.
So I sympathise with 1971genocide. I too went through the UK universities system, studying computer science, and had exactly the same frustrations. I went to a university that is considered to be in the tier just below Oxbridge, many of the students there were from very rich families. The universities reputation is good. Yet the staff were incompetent to a degree that was truly mind blowing. Very few of the people who graduated actually became software engineers full time (many went into e.g. generic consulting roles, consultancies, finance), partly because so many people graduated entirely unable to write even basic programs. Many who studied soft subjects there ended up in dead end jobs earning too little to even begin paying back their student loans.
Looking back, I probably should have skipped university. It made me miserable too, and I got a job offer (from Google) before graduating there based on open source work I'd done. If I had gone straight into a job from 18 I'd have probably been much happier and healthier in those years.