You're getting the wrong lesson out of your experiences. For the record, ignoring athletics and focusing only on student government ignores a whole plethora of

You're getting the wrong lesson out of your experiences. For the record, ignoring athletics and focusing only on student government ignores a whole plethora of non-athletic programs out there. First off, athletics, which serve a valuable part of the college experience. What's funny is I hated athletics till I went to school that had none and realized just what purpose they were playing at the first college I attended. Sports programs attract certain types of people with certain interests. Kind of like how we intellectual sorts have writers/programmers/artists/scientists, each with their own personalities and interests, athletes too have very similar characteristics between sports. It's not a completely brainwashing clique, but if you like a sport then there's a good chance people who like that sport too will get along with you in more ways than one. Most extracurricular activities are solely for the purpose of entertainment. Student Atheist Club, Board Game Club, all the frats, exist so that you can find whatever sort of entertainment you're looking for. If you like debating religion, there's a club for that. You do it for fun, not as part of an ongoing business agenda. It's for being nonserious and whimsical. As for your own experience: You seem to think that just because you worked in a shitty program, all college programs have to be shitty. That's not how it works. Some of them are very polished and tightly-run, just as some companies are shitty and some are great. But they all have that social college element, and that's what counts. When you do work on your own, you miss out on the people around you, you miss the chance to be with dozens of people. Now, I've heard the "misanthrope" defense, where you don't like 99% of people and so don't mind missing out on them, and my response to that is that if you're in a college where you hate everybody, you're in a bad college. Transfer to a place where everybody is incredible by your standards. They exist, because somebody like you at some point decided to make a place like that and it worked. This is why you want to research your college opportunities before you go to a mindbogglingly shitty place. Now, my college is the sort of college where in your class you work on actively making the college a better place and where a part of graduation is interning with a company and securing a potential job offer after graduation, so perhaps I'm spoiled by my "nonreal" college stuff, but all the people complaining about how bad college was seem to be people who just ended up at shitty colleges.