Unfortunately, or maybe even fortunately for the rest of us, this 'wisdom' isn't necessarily true unless you believe it to be. I worked extremely hard during university both in my school work and at multiple jobs, it was far from 'the best years'. Now, most of the people who had all the fun in university agree with you. For me, it just keeps getting better. "The harder you work, the luckier you get" might have been better advice.

You just may be in the group of people who enjoy working!

Or, maybe he actually did a lot of work during college instead of "enjoying the college experience". Compared to that, "real life work" is usually nicer

Yeah.

Or doing a PhD.

After that, any non-academic job is super easy.

Same here. I studied really hard while working 30 hours a week. I am so glad I never have to go to college again. It was easily the hardest time of my life. But it was worth it. I now have a great job (which is tons easier than college) that pays really well.

I blame all those '80s college movies showing college being all about drinking, partying, and getting laid. Gives kids a false impression that that's what going to university is going to be.

I don't know where/when those people you mention went to undergrad. When I went, it was brutal and endless. In order to graduate in 4 years, I had to take 18-20 credits per semester. When I wasn't in the classroom, I was in lab, and when I wasn't in lab, I was working on hours and hours of assignments. The professors never coordinated workload, so it all came at once in waves. All the exams were done in the same week, too, so you'd have to frantically cram. EDIT: Then, there was the job hunt during junior and senior years. Resume after resume, application after application, interview after interview. If I actually did any partying, I certainly don't remember it. Those four years were a blur of coursework that I still have nightmares about and am glad are firmly in the past. No job I've ever had in the decades since has come close to the amount of workload I had in university.

Here in Poland, only people studying medicine and maybe some hard sciences (chemistry, physics) at best universities get so much workload. I studied CS at a supposedly one of top universities and I probably studied (in and out of class) for 10-20 hours per week on average.

I fucking hate schoolwork though, it always made me significantly more miserable than job-work ever did

For me it wasn't nearly as bad. For one thing, there was so much less schoolwork than job-work. And, while in school, you never had to pretend to the other children that you cared. Also, in school, there weren't many layers of management, product owners etc. all giving unclear and contradictory directions - schoolwork was downright trivial compared to a serious project in a large corp. And this is all coming from a privileged software worker - my family members (the ones saying that childhood and adolescence are the best) were all semi-skilled manual workers. In their cases, I just don't see how sitting at your desk 40 hours a week doing the same thing (say, routine testing methane analysers) over and over again for 40 years, while worrying about making ends meet or being fired, can be better than some school work and oceans of free time.

I preferred school work. I could fuck up a few times and not be expelled. Fuck up once at a job, and you're fired, no severance, no anything. At my last job (hopefully my LAST job) I was fired for the crime of questioning the validity of using work in progress Pull Requests as a KPI. I was fired on a Thursday, and I did not get paid for Friday. (Name and shame: Cloudpassage.com. A failing company).

School was better. You don't become homeless if you get a D

>My parents and aunt had this wisdom and, while I was a child, told me "enjoy yourself now, because it will be all downhill from here".

Being told that as a child really fucked me up, actually. It's a really bad, pernicious idea.