It's not just the depth, but the breadth as well. Better universities do an amazing job of teaching their students how to learn. The curriculum is thoughtfully

It's not just the depth, but the breadth as well. Better universities do an amazing job of teaching their students how to learn. The curriculum is thoughtfully designed to produce well rounded students who are capable of achieving expertise in their chosen field (they don't leave college as experts by any stretch.. and THAT is the disconnect surrounding education these days). The big difference between someone coming out of a higher-end school and a community college isn't (necessarily) intelligence or even knowledge, it's that the university educated ones have been prepared to reason about the world in a more complete way. Which is comforting for me to know when I'm hiring. I should note: I didn't finish college (I made it through three years). My wife on the other hand went on to a PhD. At 24 I was convinced that I had missed nothing. It wasn't until about a decade later that I began to understand that she was capable of seeing so much more nuance and detail than I was. Partly because she's smarter, but partly because she had so much more substance to her education. It gives her a basis to reason from that I don't have. It's a gap I'm feverishly trying to close through completing my own education... but it sure would have been easier to have done it in my 20's...