I was excited for actual learning and education but what I found was a bureaucratic box checking exercise.

That's not to say that learning didn't occur or that individual professors or students didn't care about learning. It's just to say that the 'system' of Universities didn't care all that much about learning, or at the very least it was not the primary objective of the system.

Something like the ability to follow procedures, conformity, compliance, etc. seemed to be the point. Or perhaps the primary purpose of Universities seems to be to perpetuate the existence of the University.

The real value of University for me was networking and job opportunities (which are a kind of networking).