That's kind of my point - the nature of "study on my own" is different than "can I find the resources I need to solve a particular problem". College is creating a problem of "pass this test" or "complete this assignment"; studying on your own, yes, you don't know where your blind spots are or where to begin, because you don't have a problem you're trying to solve. College provides you some, but they aren't fundamentally different than work problems. And while some classes may attempt to 'teach' the material, the ones where that was an effective use of my time (rather than just read the textbook, or those where class time was unrelated to the projects we were graded on) were definitely in the minority. YMMV.
You can ask a professor, or multiple ones. If the classes are within your major, the school will guide you. This part is a non-problem. You can also take several classes for a week or two, depending on the school, and see which ones suit your priorities.
> College provides you some, but they aren't fundamentally different than work problems.
Usually the opposite is said, that college problems are not at all like what you encounter in work, that students are unprepared for work problems and that professors don't understand them. College problems are crafted carefully for you to acquire knowledge and skills; work problems are crafted to avoid having you learn, because that takes extra time.
> And while some classes may attempt to 'teach' the material, the ones where that was an effective use of my time (rather than just read the textbook, or those where class time was unrelated to the projects we were graded on) were definitely in the minority. YMMV.
I think this is not realistic for most people. It's also possible you missed a lot without the professor's context and expertise. In anything, would you rather just read a book or have access to an expert mentor? There's no question IME.
Maybe it depends on the courses, which I'm starting to suspect explains a lot of the response at HN: Were you in a STEM field, particularly T or E?
Conversely I learned functional programming, multiple languages and new CS concepts, fault tolerant system design, and system architecture skills, all in the context of a short period of work.
Where else will you get the direct access to expertise in all those fields, guiding you in what works/experiments/skills/etc to read/learn/acquire, answering questions personally, the massive labs and libraries, the students to study with.
As someone who has tried to study on my own at a serious level, I would say the opposite: Studying on my own is nothing like it. I am very jealous of those in college. I don't know which books and papers to read, how to contextualize them, what they have and lack; I have nobody to ask (Reddit and Stack Exchange being very poor substitutes); I lack access to resources that are far too expensive, JSTOR being a simple example, making much study very time-consuming or impossible. I regularly run into things, years later, that would have been introduced in the first day of class by an expert - I have an unknown but large quantity of blind spots.