> the course that I'm in makes these classes absolutely mandatory.
You should try harder to get around this. I've never had a problem getting "mandatory" requirements waived.
If you don't manage to waive the classes, but are indeed hot shit, you should be able to crank out a semester's work in a day or two sometime early on. Professor might be more impressed/willing to waive when you turn in every problem, solved, on day one.
The idea is that a, colleges move to you places you'd never be (I have friends at NYU and Dublin who absolutely are getting more out of the locale than they are anything else), and b, because college is specifically made so that people can learn, you'll attract a purer blend of people, all of whom are interested in learning.
For the most part, that latter point is absolute bullshit. College has become so psychologically mandatory in the United States that people go to college whether or not they're truly interested in learning. And while I love the idea of liberal arts learning, and while hopefully if I stay I'll learn things I'd never thought to learn otherwise, the fact of the matter is that as colleges defocus themselves, there's less of an emphasis on really bright people who are going to blaze through early college to get to a meaningful level. In my classes, I'm learning to program in Processing and Scratch, for instance: one is a kid's language, for crying out loud, and for the other, I can't see the point of using Processing rather than Java. In my other classes, I'm learning to use Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, both programs that I have a good deal of familiarity with. It's an absolute waste, and my professors absolutely realize this, but they have no choice because other kids don't know a thing about programming, and the course that I'm in makes these classes absolutely mandatory.
As for the kids being enlightened and focused: don't get me started. At the time of this writing, one kid is in trouble because he brought tons of kids to his house and they threw up and now he's refusing to apologize to his parents because, as he puts it, "I'm in college. This should be expected behavior." Same kid told a real knee-slapper about stealing four thousand dollars while working at a Target. I mean, it makes for an amusing story, but it's despicable. And I'm in a pretty top-notch school, for what it's worth.
No, people who are really fascinated in learning nowadays tend to try and be practical about what they know: I'd bet that the brightest people of college age are doing things like trying to create start-ups, or at the very least trying to earn a living with the skills they've got.