Certainly it's possible to deviate from the consensus, at least up to a point, and I'm all in favor of doing so.
I think that's the point that the blog is trying to make: college has become something of less value, even in the minds of the people who attend it. No longer is it some special thing, even though it should be a special thing. Now it's just an extra 4 or 6 years applied to the end of your existing 13 years in school. Some people apply to college just to go through the motions, and attend it in the same way, and I hate that. College has turned into another mandatory for most people.
I'm not saying there's no purpose to college - my first semester was all mandatory know-nothing classes, but this coming semester I'm in an advanced design course, an upper-level coding class, and I'm taking "intro to religion" for fun - but at the same time, there's a very important point being made with this blog, and that's "Only go to college if you really want to get something out of it." Otherwise, there are other more satisfying routes available.
I think it was Einstein who said one always cuts a poor figure if one complains about others who are struggling for their place in the sun too, after their own fashion.
When I'm in a beginner's coding class, sitting next to a girl who doesn't know how to program and hates the idea of programming, and she'd rather copy my stuff, then it lowers my ideal of what the class ought to be. When the professor cares more about making a joke and talking about her son than she is about teaching as effectively as possible, it lowers my ideal.
Not everybody's like that - I love my roommate and some of my floormates - but my point was that college is not for everybody. For instance, at this moment it's not for me. I've got an idea for something I want to do with my life - not my whole life, but my life right now - and I'm benefitting from planning parts of my life around that idea, and seeing it grow, and possibly seeing it succeed. After that, I'll probably end up back in college, but older and wiser and surrounded, hopefully, by people who've gone through similar experiences.
It may be different in later years, but that's my perspective as a freshman. College is built around the social. If it wasn't, then it wouldn't matter as much.
But Universities are big - surely, you can find people who are of the same world view. Again, at Rutgers, we had ~40k undergrads. Given that many people, it wasn't all that hard to get together a suite of 6 math majors, hang up a huge whiteboard (technically, shower wall from Home Depot), and geek it up :)
As far as classes, it gets a lot better after you finish the common pre-requisites (if your school doesn't offer "honors" sections of those). When you have the choices of picking one of a dozen classes each taught by a couple of different professors (I'm thinking across-semesters), smart people often start gravitating toward the same teachers - ask around.
Hopefully this'll be the first semester where I'm really going interesting stuff. One of my first-semester professors let me and a friend into one of his top-level courses, so I'm excited for that.
Any large university will give you enough of a selection of professors for you to be able to focus on the good ones.
What this hell is "our society"? Is it the most common occurring opinion of a set of people magnitudes larger than the set of people you will meet in your lifetime? Our society is made up of a lot of people. If some, even most, have bought into a particular idea, it still leaves many, many people who haven't.
So even if 99% of our society has bought into the idea that education must be vocational doesn't mean that one can't go through life spending most of her time with people in the other 1%.
As I advanced through my schooling, I had more and more Renaissance-personalties as teachers. At Rutgers University, I had enough choice that I was able to pick classes almost exclusively taught by people who didn't think of my education as vocational. Sure, it took a bit of work at the beginning of each semester - adding and dropping classes based on the first couple of lectures and conversations with the professors, but it certainly wasn't some insurmountable feat. Independent studies helped a lot, also.
IMO, there's a greater pattern here - a large part of life is about avoiding the vast majority of people who focus their lives around petty nonsense.
PS - Unless you're talking about maximizing social productivity of some kind, in which case, yes, it is a shame that most people see themselves as slaves being trained to do a job. The average person would be a lot happier and productive if we were to pursue our interests for their own sake, but that's their mistake to make.