"I will say this though: the exposure to different ideas and the broadening of the mind that comes from a good education is rather priceless."

I think this is what psychologists call a "taboo tradeoff". Education (and life, health, freedom, etc.) is a sacred value, while money is a secular value, so it's considered taboo to trade one off against the other. (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/psychology-of-tabo...)

Unfortunately, making these tradeoffs is necessary, because there are many competing values and a limited supply of money. For example, you can show that a hospital must either a) assign a consistent dollar value to human life, or b) must be wasting resources, ie. it could be saving more lives with the money it has. See eg. Peter Singer's essay at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19healthcare-t.ht....