- books can partially teach you the "how" and also partially the "why".

- at university, you are being taught how to teach yourself, not necessarily how to perform practical things. Age of the exercise is therefore less relevant.

- ideally, teaching a room full of 50 students is easy better than an online class with 50, which easily should beat a video. Not all classes are like this which is a shame.

Why does this have to be done in a university setting? Is this explicitly conveyed or is this an outcome of going through classes and it’s what it takes to succeed?

Personally, when I was studying at a pretty strong university in terms of global rankings, I didn’t really “learn to learn” from the classes. The most helpful to me was Cal Newport’s blog (from his grad student days), Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange soft questions, hn discussions about learning and studying, and office hours when I explicitly asked Profs how they study, learn, and solve problems.

When I took what I learned from those sources and stopped going to class to instead work through the textbook/course material at my own pace, my grades improved significantly. If I am able to get an “A” without going to class, does that mean the Prof / university successfully taught me the material or whatever lesson(s) were to be learned?

Sorry for the rant, but I feel the default shouldn’t be to go through higher education to learn to learn. (I’m not saying you are saying that.) So, how can these lessons be made available more widely available?

vs getting a self-taught junior role early and not being $100k in debt?

I do think there is a ton of value in getting feedback from a professor or colleague, but you can get pretty far with a book.