I personally believe university is exactly what you make of it. I went for a full 4 years to an expensive private university with a good reputation in my field,

I personally believe university is exactly what you make of it. I went for a full 4 years to an expensive private university with a good reputation in my field, and it’s done a lot to open doors for me. However, I don’t really believe that my accomplishments (work I have to show) from my time there is automatically better or higher quality than peers from state schools or self-taught people. But the words on the resume do work. The truth to me seems that a lot of ego and subjective judgement comes from the prestige of university to begin with, and oftentimes any specific school is not a guarantor of quality or success. And if alumni from “good colleges” are not easily distinguishable after 5 years from alumni from “middle colleges”, then to me that calls into question the entire system as potentially dubious. It’s not that university “doesn’t work”, it’s that it mostly just isn’t a good value of dollars-to-knowledge at todays prices.