This gets it a bit backwards, the money is a reward for playing along within the system, not a straight cash-for-policy transaction.
If you don't play along with the elite line, they throw $50 million into a primary election to get you out of power. That's where you start to get into enough money to make a political difference, and even then the money is only part of the equation.
Maybe not everything needs to "scale"? You're asking each student to spend well over 100 hours in lectures and study for each class. Surely you can find 20 or 30 minutes per student for evaluation.
You could build the equivalent PC for quite a bit cheaper or a PS5 and 7 full price AAA games for the same price. No way this is a console-killer, but will be a nice novelty for Gaben fans for whom $1049 is not a significant amount of money.
It reminds me of the Apple Vision Pro hype trailer. "Put on a helmet so you can view 2D photographs in 3D space." Present-day Apple sure has a way of making extremely impressive tech seem totally superfluous.
If you don't play along with the elite line, they throw $50 million into a primary election to get you out of power. That's where you start to get into enough money to make a political difference, and even then the money is only part of the equation.