Something I realized around seven semesters too late is that most programs are conducive to independent studies, which is I'm sure a wildly broad term but at my alma mater it was basically "Go spend three months on your own learning something interesting and then write a paper or a powerpoint or a plugin on it." You'd have an advisor (or sometimes a board of advisors) to meet with you every few weeks, but the work was all entirely self-directed, sort of like a mini-honors thesis.

I imagine that those are going to become increasingly popular. If you abstract it out, its basically a credential system for productive independent thought, which is sort of the whole point.

Independent study credit is definitely worth looking into, if your college has such a possibility (most do).

However, as someone who supervises independent studies regularly, I can also say: independent studies are by far the classes most likely to result in the student just not doing anything at all, which to some extent shows why autodidacticism is not universal yet. In a traditional semester-long class with two-times-a-week meetings, it's very rare for a student to literally do nothing. Most will show up at least some of the time, and do at least some of the work. But it's easy to put off an independent study, because you have complete flexibility, and don't have to do anything this week if other things are more pressing. Then you end up 90% of the way through the semester realizing you haven't done anything.

Some very good stuff comes out of independent-study projects, but the variance is large, and it doesn't work for everyone. As a supervisor, they take a disproportionate amount of management effort, just trying to track students down and prod them into non-procrastination.

Where did you go to school if I may ask?

The College of William & Mary, in Williamsburg, VA.

They do (usually). You can even get credit for it, at least in the US, it called CLEP - https://clep.collegeboard.org/. Cheapest year of college I ever had - was around $200.

I skipped an entire years worth of useless general ed courses to get my "requirements" to graduate out of the way at my college on 6 CLEP tests. I think the notes I took for those tests reading the wikibooks and wikipedia articles on the various topics on those tests were some of the best domain information notes I've taken. I also wrote them online, so pretty much all my K-12 notes are useless, but I gave my CLEP notes to my extended family with notes they need to read the material themselves but I did a bunch of work already.

A lot of colleges won't allow you to CLEP out of things anymore, sadly. :( There's too much money to be made off of you.

Now you can take AP courses, or "Advanced Placement". Through my high school each test was about $80, you're graded on a scale of 1-5 which is on a percentage basis (X% of people get a 5, etc). Schools can determine what sort of credit they want to take, but general rule is 3 or higher. My college only took 5s in sciences, but it was an engineering school.

I skipped out on 26 credit hours of 140ish for the degree. It basically allowed me to change my major a year in without impacting my graduation date.

Yes, my school had AP courses as well, but only two of them. :( I think it's because my school was rural and poor. I've always been jealous of people who got to go to schools where they could take seven or eight AP courses and get a massive headstart on college.

Can you link your CLEP notes?

Most of the value you can get from universities is through networking. If you don't meet anyone while you are there your degree truly is worthless. It isn't merely a matter of learning it for the sake of learning it is a matter of other people knowing that you know something or not.