What a university can provide is direction: an explicit decision about the order concepts are learned, and the perspective each concept is approached from. Tha

What a university can provide is direction: an explicit decision about the order concepts are learned, and the perspective each concept is approached from. That can be really useful, especially when professors have enough free time to spend with individual students. It can also be really detrimental: every person has a unique education history that determines what order and perspectives are most optimal to their learning. The problem I see is that university is structure. The entire design is intended to be predetermined and inflexible. Edge cases are handled by bringing a student "back on track", assuming that track to be the best learning approach for every student. Most of the substance of "liberal arts" is exactly what a person needs to learn to progress out of this system. The irony of a successful university experience is that the more successful it is at teaching you, the sooner you can walk away and continue learning on your own.