[jimmies]

>To be honest, I didn't find the extra "things" that my university taught outside of my Computer Science program to be of value. I took two public speaking classes, multiple business courses, and plenty of other general education courses.

I don't think you would get great values in those public speaking and business classes. I personally agree that people who want to do those things better just start doing it (although, the article tells a different story about the cook). Introductory science courses (which I would otherwise not being able to learn on my own) were certainly worth the price I paid for. I was in a public university and those 3-credit hours courses used to cost me about 800 USD per. There are not many other things that I could better spend my money - I think those are of great value (Although the MOOCs have shown that the price point for really good basic education could be set much lower, but with some trade-offs.)

[svnsets]

>Introductory science courses (which I would otherwise not being able to learn on my own) were certainly worth the price I paid for.

Out of curiosity, why do you think you would not be able to learn introductory science without spending $800 on a uni course?

[jimmies]

The other day a person asked on HN - he stated he taught himself to program, but feel insecure because he feel he can never be a legitimate programmer, he even doesn't know how to deal with pointers. I find myself the same way before I went to college -- I tried to program in Pascal with a college level textbook and couldn't gasp the idea of pointers. Not until college do I understand what pointers are -- after only 5 minutes of lecture from my professor.

I had a lot of a-ha moments in college like that. That is to say, the example above is for something I knew that I didn't know, there were many a-ha of something I didn't know I didn't know. Science courses are often dense and not everyone can easily gasp ideas in the textbooks or online resources without help. I wouldn't know to look up and study chaos theory, game theory, and many other interesting ideas without a primer in college. Plus, being able to interact and ask and see as things progress when the professor explains the problem is quite worth the money to me. Again, MOOC can provide some of those, but with trade-offs (I can't interrupt the professor to ask something everyone understands, but I don't). MOOC was not an option when I went to college though.