I have a degree from an elite college (Amherst, #1 liberal arts college in the country at the time I went). I took a gap year before and worked as a profession

I have a degree from an elite college (Amherst, #1 liberal arts college in the country at the time I went). I took a gap year before and worked as a professional software engineer, where I learned a massive amount. Then I spent 3.5 years taking a variety of interesting courses that have been utterly irrelevant to my future career prospects, before flunking out of my physics major, switching to CS, and completing that major in a semester using the knowledge I learned while working as a professional software engineer. You're paying for the degree. If you want to take interesting courses, learn cool stuff, socialize with intelligent students, and meet Nobel-prize-winning professors, most professors will let you audit their course even if you're not a student at the university, particularly if you seem genuinely interested in the material. (Hell, I'd taken half a dozen college courses as a high-school student before I even got to college.) It just won't count toward the degree, because the colleges know that their business model is selling a limited credential that the rest of the world values very highly.