these are all fair points if not slightly pedantic... obviously I feel I received some value from college (in my case, the soft value outweighs the hard values

these are all fair points if not slightly pedantic... obviously I feel I received some value from college (in my case, the soft value outweighs the hard values). like I said, I don't necessarily think college is the best place to spend 4 years of life and many thousands of dollars if you are not gaining any type of skill, earning a value-add level of expertise in a field, or great general skill set improvements. It had a significant impact on me, although most of the skills I learned there were improvements on traits/ skills I already possessed. I would whole heartedly agree that coursework can be dramatically optimized to better prepare students for a variety of careers [which I think will be the future case as trade schools, crash course programming schools and various workshops appear, and colleges continue to get pushback from those who have not been snapped up into the workforce] but as bluedino mentioned, university life allows for a fairly unique set of circumstances: most young people, densely populated by people in relatively similar circumstances, rapidly maturing as people, learning a wide variety of new/ interesting things. >> for me from 18-22 this experience held quite a bit of value.