> No, I refuse to buy lottery tickets. "Who Dares Wins" Like it or not, but there are no guaranteed outcomes in pretty much anything. Only when you're paying

> No, I refuse to buy lottery tickets. "Who Dares Wins" Like it or not, but there are no guaranteed outcomes in pretty much anything. Only when you're paying for a lunch in a caffe it's sort of guaranteed that you'll get your calories. When you're paying for tuition you're only getting a chance to learn something, and now it's entirely up to you to use this chance (and still fail even by trying as hard as you can). > Smart consumers don't spend £9,000 a year on lottery tickets. Exactly. Smart consumers will first exhaust all the other options, and, most importantly, will gauge their chance to succeed in this race first before joining it. > the universal desire for a degree from an accredited college This is a myth. Stop spreading it. > And in the Information Age, I have plenty of "access to an infrastructure" outside of the university walls. Use it first. Go to the university only when all the other routes are exhausted. Otherwise universities are full of random people who do not really belong there. > There is not a single thing I learned academically from my pricey MIT degree that I could not have learned by reading textbooks and websites on my own. It means that you failed miserably. Congratulations. You had a priceless opportunity to extort the knowledge from some of the best, most bleeding-edge researchers, who had hours of their precious time allocated for you alone. But instead you did everything by the book, did your assignments, read your textbooks, attended your lectures - exactly the most stupid kind of stuff to do in any university, not just MIT. Btw., I failed too, far too often I'm reading an obituary for a top scientist and realising that years ago I lost a unique opportunity to interrogate him thoroughly.