My belief: It's highly impractical to get a scholarship unless you volunteer or have lots of research experience.

I have a 3.95+ GPA or something. I don't care about anything beyond the .9. Anyway, I was offered an $8000 scholarship from a local university. This was due to my grades and outside activities. That brings the tuition to $15,000 a year or less. That's not bad to tell you the truth. But what is bad is this:

The people around here are not intelligent enough for me.

I know the professors there, and they aren't any more intelligent than the one's around me.
I've decided to pay the $23,000+ a year for the better school.

But the main point is, there are people who will give merit awards and more.

If you're going to be forced to be around stupid people for 4 years you might as well do it for free. You shouldn't be spending sixty thousand dollars on a complete waste of your time. There are many places you could apply to (typically state universities) that will give you full tuition, you don't have to spend this much for a shitty education.

Good luck finding an Ivory Tower.

The people around here are not intelligent enough for me.

I know the professors there, and they aren't any more intelligent than the one's around me.

Trollage?

How can an entire university be staffed by idiots? What the hell does that even mean? Even schools without much of a reputation will present challenging curriculum in math and science. Humanities teachers can always just show movies (though I find it hard to believe there'd be a whole school of nothing but that kind), but there's not much room for compromise in math and science.

"the one's around me." Are you going to community college now or something? I think it's funny how as easy as my former high school classmates have said community college is, so many of them have flunked out or lost their scholarship that the place generously gives pretty much everyone who can graduate.