Forgive a newbie for buttin' in but it isn't necessarily either a rip-off or gullibility, depending on the aim of the school and the goals of the participant. Granted, paying somebody three grand to teach you to maintain your own bike is pretty darned foolish. If you have decent reading comprehension and are reasonably mechanically inclined you can pick up $30 worth of books and dive right in. You'll make mistakes but you'll learn from them and it's just your bike you're screwing up during the learning process.

However, paying somebody three grand for the training and credentials to easily land a decent job as a bike mechanic with a major dealer is not necessarily a bad idea. If you run a bike shop where your bread and butter is maintaining very expensive bikes for often very picky customers, and two guys show up in response to your help wanted ad, which one are you going to hire? The guy who says, "yeah, I read three books and rebuilt my own bike once" or the guy who can show that he graduated from a formal training program that has a decent reputation in the industry?

Further consider that as an LBS owner you may have to provide factory-specific training to the new employee to remain eligible to recover reimbursement for warranty repairs (not sure if it's this way in the bike world but it sure is in other industries). Do you want to hire the guy off the street or the guy who has already proven that he can be trained?

You should see what trainers in the IT industry get for a week-long (sometimes less) course! Four-hundred bucks per day of training is about average. In these cases you're paying not so much for the training (although you will usually pick up tidbits of experience from a live trainer that just never make it into books) but for the credentials.

Regards,
John