I think if we considered starting a program like that on the moon instead, it would be more affordable - but still unaffordable to all but the richest industrialists and oil barons. At least on the moon, you can rotate many times more students/researchers because you don't need to wait for proper orbit alignment. Academicians could come for a couple of weeks instead of a couple of years at a time to get their materials and data. The actual process of education could still take place on Earth, where living is much cheaper, and the facilities would only need to 1/52 as big as on Mars to move the same number of people through in a given amount of time. Lunar colonists could charge more the equivalent of rent, as opposed to a lower lease type rate, and thus bring in more revenue.Looking at the cost, that's a twenty million dollar education (rock bottom) using today's technology. Most medical specialists don't spend more than a half a million over twelve years for their degrees, and they typically make that back in a couple of years. I'm not sure what a student could do that would bring in $20 million over the course of his/her lifetime that he/she couldn't learn to do better on Earth. That doesn't mean I still wouldn't love to do a post doc on Mars.Now, if someone else were to pick up the tab (e.g. if there was a competitively awarded government scholarship for "Scholars in Space"), I could see this picking up a little bit of steam in a couple of decades.