When I was an undergraduate, the "lower division", more introductory, required courses were taught by specialists in "Computer Science Education", whatever the heck that is. I hated them. They were ... useful, as a basis for everything later, but they weren't taught well and if that is all there were, I would be very unhappy about the time and money wasted. Then I reached the "upper division", mostly elective courses taught by active researchers in the given field. Sure, their lectures and such were not well polished and rather uneven, but their enthusiasm for the subject generally shone through and you could get more insight from a chat with a professor on a ten-minute walk from class than from any textbook you've ever seen.
TAs that could understand the material and see where you went wrong. Classmates who were challenging and who asked questions you never thought about.
The whole package is what makes it good.
I also think that this is a larger societal problem that should be but has not been addressed by social networking apps. There are no social networks that are designed to foster communication about highly specific ideas. Sure I can go to r/history to find people who are generally interested in history, but where can I go to find people who would be interested in book-clubbing G.J. Meyer's 'A World Undone'? If I want to talk about physics in general, I could go to /r/physics. But how do I find physicists who want to discuss matter-antimatter asymmetry? You can glom on to conversations in current social networks, but there is no way to start/find/subscribe to discussions about very specific subject matter.
Point being, rather than saying that the IRL personal interactions at college are a reason why the current model is ideal, we could do a lot of good by figuring out how to port that experience A) onto online courses, and B) onto the world at large.
As to TFA, I think that for a lot of people trade schools are a better option, and should often be encouraged. I'd like to see more general education regarding retirement planning etc as well earlier on, as this is a place a lot of people get stuck, esp. in the US.
Another issue is that people should be guided towards educational paths that have demand in the workplace. Does it make sense to go 200k into debt for a job that pays 38k/year, or graduate 10k students for a career path with only 100 openings. Some of this onus is on the students and parents, but the schools themselves could do much better with this. Some reform on funding might help, but it's a touchy subject.
For all the flack that Facebook gets, you may also be surprised to find some very specific interest groups, I wish they had not removed the live messenger chat for groups specifically though..
We are rapidly testing this hypothesis during the current pandemic.
Yep. I'm reminded of the MOOCs. The idea was to remove all elements from the class that had a cost (i.e., no office hours, no questions during the lectures). MOOCs turned out to be a better textbook, not a better class.
With that said though, imagine if the baseline for every class in every university was "great classes with awesome course material". Now the differentiating factor becomes what you talked about - the quality of the TAs, the professors and their research, your classmates. Wouldn't that be an improvement?
I'm thinking of it as us automating away the non-creative part of school - i.e. as you noted, the valuable stuff is the interactions and the peers, so why not maximize the focus on creating opportunities for that?