Well, maybe it is useful for a lot of people, but not everyone. I went to one of the best universities (famous west coast one) and was really looking forward to

Well, maybe it is useful for a lot of people, but not everyone. I went to one of the best universities (famous west coast one) and was really looking forward to it. I had dropped out of high school to go to community college where I did learn many good things like calculus and physics. At the big name university though, I learned almost nothing in the classes. Partly this was because I had been programming and designing and inventing for years, reading journal articles, participating in conferences, selling my software, freelancing, etc. The classes were really backwards and a waste of time. But it was also because the professors at research universities are really lousy at teaching and don't give one whit whether they are effective, assuming they can even be bothered to show up for lecture rather than send their pet grad student/slave boy. Did I learn things outside of classes, like you mention? Absolutely! And I would have learned those things outside of classes by not enrolling in the first place at all. All in all I wasted a bunch of money and a few years of my life that I should have spent starting my next business earlier rather than stalling out while my competitors advanced. Now I am not saying it is useless for everyone. But something like engineering, come on, that stuff can all be learned faster and deeper from practicing it rather than listening to BS from guys that have never released a single finished product in a usable state in their entire lives. What the hell do they know. Medicine, sure, people should go to medical school. Languages? Move to that country. History? Library. Engineering? Build and invent things; then try to manufacture, market and sell them. It goes on and on. When books cost more than a years salary in the middle ages, university made sense. Now I can buy books for $10 on the net that have more info in them than the $200 college textbooks, and I can participate in discussion groups and mailing lists with professionals to learn more of any craft, and I can send emails to the greatest experts in the world and get a response back within hours. The internet community has replaced college. Universities are obsolete. Going into debt for that stuff is just for dumb people. OK, I got a bit off topic there. Let me get back to the post I started with. I absolutely 100% agree that any sort of online learning community that you have to pay for or that is associated with these obsolete institutions called universities will be a substandard way to learn things and should be avoided. I totally agree with that. However, that doesn't mean that online access to community doesn't work. It does! It's just that so-called educators nowadays can't possibly succeed at educating on line when they can't even do it in person. Non-organized independent learning communities, whether they are called that or not (they aren't called that) are in fact a fantastic way to learn and far superior to modern institutions. As learning communities of equals, they are closer to the universities of ancient times when people actually became educated.