I see where you are coming from, but the fallacy goes both ways. The same thing can be said about about pilot training. There are other avenues of training a pilot that are much cheaper than pilot than UPT. But the Air Force has control over the product. While there are outliers, the Air Force has much more control over the Academy product than an ROTC product. I'm not saying it's better or not, but they have more control and they like that.
And there aren't thousands of colleges out there academically as good as the Academy. Still burn it down.