This argument falls apart if you consider what field we're talking about. At what point would going to school for 5 years give you the whole education you actually needed? Does learning C in 1995-2000 prepare you for Rust in 2026? No, and it shouldn't, but work needs done, so _yes_ there is a dollar amount of value for educating your workforce that has already been vetted and already knows the context for your business goals. Asking what that number is completely misses the point.

Actually I found that if you have a pretty good understanding of the core parts of the C standard (e.g. the idea of the abstract machine, storage durations, unspecified vs undefined behavior, etc.) and working experience with the language, Rust is then quite natural. To first approximation, Rust basically makes lifetime management/ownership semantics that would be "good practice" in C into mandatory parts of the type system.

If all you got out of a Computer Science undergrad program was "learning C" you were severely shortchanged. An 8-week bootcamp could have done that.