The article is written from the perspective of someone who has not enjoyed the benefits of a college education: The premise is that at ~17 years old (or any age

The article is written from the perspective of someone who has not enjoyed the benefits of a college education: The premise is that at ~17 years old (or any age), people know what to learn and how to learn it. Good college educations require a diversity of classes so students can learn from and about the incredible diversity of valuable ideas and knowledge. The belief that you already know what you want and can dismiss the rest is ignorant and arrogant (usually one follows the other). If you believe that, you most need a college education -- open-mindedness, an intellectual humility, and the desire to seek challenges to your ideas are hallmarks of the well-educated and are major benefit of good college educations; the more I learn the more humble I become! As Richard Feynman said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool." College has requirements regarding what and how you learn because they know more about it than you do, and would be shortchanging you if they did otherwise. Does a good developer let clients design their own solutions or let them choose bad ones? The educators are experts in their fields and in education; they have experience with thousands (at large universities, even millions) of people getting educations, research on learning, and much more. What do you know about it? I'm not saying that their ideas are all correct, correct for you, or shouldn't be challenged, but it's foolish to discard them wholesale. The DIY hacker myth is exciting -- people will do it all themselves -- it's the old American rugged individualism. People who follow it limit themselves to their own imaginations, rather than the combined imaginations of a university full of smart people (including fellow students). You can't even imagine what you don't know; if you are dismissing whole fields then you are not even looking. College is not for everyone, but that's a meaningless truism used as an excuse. The more intellectually able and curious you are, the more an institution full of very smart highly-educated people, experts in their fields, willing to spend months teaching you, waiting for you to walk into their offices and ask them questions, should appeal to you.