> In a word, baloney. I got a great deal out of college, far more than I would have with self-study. I'm not just saying this off the cuff, there's pretty stro

> In a word, baloney. I got a great deal out of college, far more than I would have with self-study. I'm not just saying this off the cuff, there's pretty strong evidence that the thing you are paying for is the signal. Consider anecdotal evidence in terms of what people consider valuable - in many colleges you can walk in to any class without presenting any identification and just start learning, for free. If you asked the Professor if you can sit in on the class even though you are not enrolled in the school, I'm fairly certain a huge majority of them would say yes (I've done it myself for multiple classes at a law school). > I know that people claim you can learn math on your own, but I've never encountered one who did. Not in 40 years of working with engineers. There's a huge selection effect there, in that you can learn these things easily (especially now) on your own by using it, but people can learn these things are also generally the people for whom college is easy, so you would expect them all to have learned it in college anyway. See the Wikipedia article on Signalling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_%28economics%29#Job-market_signalling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_%28economics%29#Job...). The point is, learning is generally a beneficial side effect of our education system.