There is truth to your jaded view, you can't just pay money to live on easy street. I had peers who just copied other peoples homework or other similarly self d

There is truth to your jaded view, you can't just pay money to live on easy street. I had peers who just copied other peoples homework or other similarly self defeating behavior. They paid for education and chose not to get any. The paper degree doesn't have any value at all. It is the pain and agony of sipping on the firehouse of knowledge and the quite literal shared trauma of the whole experience that are the indicators of value. The most important lesson I learned in college is just because something feels right doesn't mean it is. Just about everything has deep complexity and nuance. If I am not studied in a field, I am probably drawing conclusions from a place of ignorance. Education is about suppressing our animal natures in order to have a better, more direct, more correct understanding of reality. Education is about destruction of delusions through systematic inquiry and critical thinking. Good education doesn't tell you what to think, but how to think, how to question yourself. It explains why things are the way they are. It is one thing to say "we stand on the shoulders of giants." But it is truly an experience to actually see the giants that we stand on. Once you spend time outside of the US you learn about the value of education. You learn about high trust vs low trust societies. You learn that people with simple views of the world produce poverty and strife. Educated people outside of the US want to immigrate to the US because of our educated population. They want to escape the consequences of their poorly educated neighbors. The mark of an uneducated person is that they think they are experts in fields they are not. Educated peopled don't want to be around that. Educated people don't want to be ruled by that. Educated people want to be around other educated people. Before you indict college education, I would encourage you to visit several poor countries and ask yourself why they are the way they are. It's obviously not as simple as poor education, but thinking about how education relates to poverty at a societal level and how education influences a society from a systemic perspective might improve your opinion of education. I took an engineering path, but when I think back on what I value from my education, it's not the technical training. I was handed opportunities I never would have had otherwise, access to some of the top experts in the world, and freedom proportional to the level of responsibility I took. College was the first time in my life I was ever around peers or people I considered smarter than myself. I am sad that your experience with education has produced the grim view of education being purely functional, I believe college is truly what you make of it.