[fivethirty]

At the risk of sounding trite, college is what you make of it. If all you care about is trading in your four years and n-thousand dollars for a marketable degree, then of course you aren't going to feel like you learned anything, but I argue that this is your fault for not prioritizing actual learning and understanding (aside: "actual learning and understanding" is an incredibly vague phrase and that bothers me. Oh well).

Just like Y Combinator is a fantastic chance to be around mentors who know a ton about startups, college is an opportunity to hang around faculty who know a ton about whatever it is you are interested in. It's perhaps easy to get an A in a class by "doing everything" required of you on the syllabus, but that doesn't mean that the opportunity for learning isn't there. If you are legitimately interested in a topic, you almost certainly have some sort of open ended question about it. Ask said questions in class of office hours, talk to your professors, get involved with research. These are all things are at the very least much harder to do outside of college, even with the internet making communication between experts trivially easy.

I'm not trying to say that you can't educate yourself outside of college to the same level that you can within, and certainly there are people who don't need to go to college to do great things, but if, when presented with the opportunities that college provides, if you can't find any way to further your own "intelligence" and "understanding", then it seems like those are not the things that you are optimizing for.

[jcnnghm]

your fault for not prioritizing actual learning and understanding

How do mandatory pre-reqs fit into this? When I went to school, I had about 10 years of programming experience already, but no java. That got me out of exactly zero classes, because the first two classes were effectively java syntax and apis. It also made the first two years of classes completely trivial, and was also unavoidable. At one point, I got accused of cheating because "it's impossible to learn C without attending lecture".

You want to know what kills the desire to seek harder things? When you have to complete a mountain of tedious bullshit that you largely already know to get anywhere, and there is no getting around it. This is a real problem with computer science degrees. I did not need to sit around and hear what if statements and looping constructs are, or watch TA's that don't really understand memory management try to explain it.

[scythe]

For the record, I'm pretty sure this doesn't happen at Stanford. It certainly didn't happen at Georgia Tech (I placed out of Python with Java and went right into circuits and assembly. Awesome.)

[Drbble]

If you went to a to a tier university you wouldn't have this problem. There are plenty of advanced courses to start with, and none of them are "Programming in X".

[fivethirty]

Sorry, in retrospect that first comment came across as super condescending when I didn't mean it that way at all.

How do mandatory pre-reqs fit into this?

I agree with you here -- they suck and shouldn't exist. I had the luxury of attending a school that (with the strange exception of the Econ department) didn't allow mandatory pre-reqs as a matter of policy.

You want to know what kills the desire to seek harder things? When you have to complete a mountain of tedious bullshit that you largely already know to get anywhere, and there is no getting around it.

Sure. But that doesn't mean that the opportunities for hard things aren't there, just that you weren't motivated (and perhaps rightly so) to pursue them. Also, these things are only tedious because you already know them. It sounds like you went back to college because you saw an economic advantage in doing so and are upset because it wasn't also intellectually advantageous. In other words, you were optimizing for economics and not knowledge. If you were instead optimizing for knowledge, then it sounds like going back to college would not have been the best choice for you, although I still stand by the claim that it's impossible to go through college without being presented with an opportunity to learn something of deep and meaningful value.

Anyway, I think the problem is not so much that college is generally useless, but rather that there is an economic benefit for seemingly smart, self-educated people like yourself to go back to college even though the experience is perhaps not that useful for you otherwise.

EDIT:

My point is this: Just because you can pass classes you already know everything about with an easy A in college doesn't mean that there isn't an opportunity to learn more advanced things via the faculty and resources provided to you and it's partially on you to take advantage of those opportunities. Moreover, I think it's impossible to go through college and have none of those opportunities open to you.

With that being said, college isn't necessarily the best way to learn things, and whether or not it is is completely dependent on who you are. In your case, college was probably economically advantageous in the long run, but sounds like it wasn't the best way to learn novel skills. This doesn't mean college isn't a valid way for people to educate themselves generally, as not everyone comes to college able to place out of everything.