You may feel it was a waste of time and money but for me, it was a bargain.
The college model is still based around a philosophy from the 1800s when they were the sole providers of information.
In college you were exposed to philosophy, literature, and a host of other things. That self-educated guy generally knows a lot about quantum mechanics, but has never bothered to read a classic novel or has never heard of Kant. All of those things form the basis and experience that allow you to learn from the world around you so much more efficiently.
I don't think college is broken, I just think the expectation that college is somehow a four year skills-training institution is fundamentally flawed.
My viewpoint on this has definitely evolved over the last decade. At 22, fresh from dropping out of college after my junior year, I would have written the same thing. A decade of experience has taught me the value of what I learned in college.
I'm somewhat ambivalent on the question of whether my liberal arts education actually made a difference in my life, but "because I heard it in psych class" would be at the very bottom of my reasons to believe so. If you're going to hold the opinion that a liberal education teaches you how to learn and informs all your future decision-making, hold it because experiences have corroborated that, not because you read in a psych textbook that that's how it's supposed to work. Textbooks do lie, y'know. ;-)
Otherwise - well, you haven't really learned how to learn, have you? If the point of a liberal education is to make sense of the world around you and form your own opinions, and you're still regurgitating things you read in a book, that liberal arts education has failed.
First of all, I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek.
However, yes I do take much of what I've learned at face value. After all, it would be foolish to take years of expert research and toss it out because I personally didn't conduct it. Unless it runs wildly counter to my personal experience, I have no real reason not to trust it as the best scientific explanation at a given time. Thankfully my personal experience most certainly corraborates it.
There is a world of difference between healthy skepticism (consistently questioning scientific theory through empirical observation) and doubting for doubting sake. I haven't personally verified that the earth orbits the sun, but I'm pretty sure we have that one right after all.
Sure you can buy the same textbooks and push yourself through them, but I'm 100% sure it would have taken me longer than 4 years to learn as much on my own as I did in college that was directly relevant to my day to day job. I'm not even sure if I could have gotten through the high end math without a lot of help.
Would you like a self taught doctor over one with a degree?
The degree is for his/her own benefit. What I care about is whether the doctor is smart and well-informed.
No, I don't think that earning the right to use the suffix "M.D." means that the doctor is well-informed and knowledgeable.
With a self-taught doctor, you just have the questions that you ask to help you judge. With a doctor who's been through school, you have both your questions and the fact that he/she has been through what has been set out by the school issuing the degree.
Here are 5 freely available introductory calculus books.
Areas differ, as always. There's an amazing amount of philosophy out there for free, for example. (I was recently impressed to see how much of Sextus Empiricus was available, and works on the Pyrrhonian skeptics in general.)
But more than that, I think you're grossly underestimating the value of four years of collaborative work with other smart students and professors. I honestly don't see any way to get a half hour of a math professor's time, every week, for three months, without taking a course in mathematics at a university and going to office hours.
It may be that you think it is too expensive, which means it's not worth it. That's fair enough. But don't deceive yourself into thinking that college offers nothing that you can't obtain somewhere else.
I welcome "continuing education" opportunities that would give me exposure to such varied academic disciplines once again. How would you purport to achieve this?
Even if you think university will teach you absolutely nothing, you've got a one-time offer from society that we're going to subsidize anything you do for the next four years and not have any expectation that you'll work for a living during that time. This offer is essentially only good once. Take it.
Just one example of many from my college experience: one day after my Digital Devices class I described a concept to my professor that I was having trouble with. I was a poor student and couldn't afford a logic probe to do my own experiments with so I figured I'd build one with the parts I had on hand.
He then spent the next 2 hours carefully deconstructing my design, showing me why it didn't work, how I could force it to work, and in the end what a much better design approach would be.
In the 20+ years since, for all the time I've spent on BBSs, Usenet sci.electronics.* , and now web-based electronics forums, I have never seen anyone provide the depth and breadth of understanding that I got that day (OK: one person on Circuit Cellar comes to mind). And bear in mind that this not an isolated incident -- I made sure to get my money's worth by asking my share of dumb questions :-)
Sure, we all try to help each other online and some of us are pretty good at it. But at a good school professors are expert, paid to teach and love doing it, and have both the time and the motivation to do so. Random strangers online seldom have either and very rarely have both.
Can colleges do better? Absolutely. But to claim that you could "get it all for free somewhere else" so completely misses the point that it's frustrating.
As for getting the same experiences by not going, that's just silly. Sure the information is available online but it's not the same as actively participating in a lecture.
I spent a lot of time banging my head against the book (that you can buy from Amazon) and Googling, but eventually you run into things that only a professor's lecture, office hours, or your fellow classmates will teach you. That is what you are paying for. If you haven't run into that, you aren't taking classes that are hard enough or you are a genius. And even if you are a genius, you likely still struggle with hard topics sometimes.
I paid nothing for college because I had a scholarship, but I'm well aware of what college loan debt looks like. My girlfriend is currently paying off about a BMW worth of college loans.
I point that out becuase I drive a 6 year old car and she drives a 7 year old car. If you take out what we're paying for student loans (and we're very aggressively trying to get rid of them so we can eact start businesses without debt), we could take that money and each lease a BMW.
Is that really that much of a sacrifice? I really think people are just overspending for college and it isn't the system that is broken, it is the decision making process high school students and their parents go through while picking their schools.
But not all careers are like software development. That's why I said the job I have right now is not one I could have gotten without a degree.
I notice the meme "college is a waste of time and money" thrown around all the time on the internet, usually by programmers, but what I really think they mean is "a computer science degree is a waste of time and money, and I also look down on liberal arts majors".
So CS majors extrapolate "I can learn my field without college" onto "Everyone can learn their field without college", and don't realize that CS is the exception, not the rule. I took a bunch of CS classes including some grad ones and I think the only one that I learned considerably from was computer vision.
There would certainly have to be gen ed considerations but Universities do those online now so it wouldn't be hard to make them available.
Anyone who paid and went for 4 years, knows its an inefficient use of time and money.
What we need to do is stop glorifying college.