Most parents insist on kids going to uni specifically to get a job. If you can get the same knowledge for free (assuming you have to pay for uni), then what's the value?
If college were about knowledge transfer, we'd all stay home and read.
The value is in guided discussions, meetings with your professors, comments on your papers and code, making friends as you finally begin to understand difficult material together in the library in the middle of the night, and 4 years of living in an environment with an anomalously high signal to noise ratio of smart people throwing 100% effort into their collective intellectual growth.
Except most colleges outside the elite (and probably a lot of students at those too) expend more like 30% of effort growing intellectually. There is also significant social growth, generally, but a lot of time at college (probably most) isn't spent on intellectual endeavors.
Yep I agree they have, but that is just a fraction of the purpose they serve today - right now they're just filling the gap until something more effective comes along, like a better version of the technical college.
Uni never should have catered to the massive demand of skilled workers, leave it to the eternal academics I say...
I'm trying to say that I found value in it, and many people do. Like I said in other posts, I'm not going to fully describe this value, because it's up to you to find it.
Just know that it's not only for a job. Universities have been around for a long time and have served many great and noble purposes.
The value is in guided discussions, meetings with your professors, comments on your papers and code, making friends as you finally begin to understand difficult material together in the library in the middle of the night, and 4 years of living in an environment with an anomalously high signal to noise ratio of smart people throwing 100% effort into their collective intellectual growth.