> How do you know what classes to take?

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?

Didn't see this response - but yes. Computer Science. From a top 10 school. Some of what I'm saying is mostly true of the two years of 'core' classes, and then some of the softer CS classes. Others include classes 'taught' by professors there for research. Literally the only classes that felt like "yeah, this was worth attending" were the ones being taught by 'instructors', not professors, i.e., people with Masters degrees rather than Ph Ds, who weren't being pressured to publish and bring in grant money. Meaning I can think of roughly...4, of the dozens of classes I took, that felt worth it. And chunky classes, like Data Structures and Algorithms, and Computer Graphics, there was no point to attending the class; an hour invested in the textbook was worth more than an hour attending.

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.