[joe5150]

You can double up on a lot in high school (AP, IB, dual enrollment) or CLEP out of a good number of GenEd classes, but not everybody has the access and support they need to pull that off. There's potential value in going to college (as in _being in college_) that isn't strictly measured in credit hours as well.

[croemer]

Oh absolutely, most of the value is being there not in the credit hours. At Cambridge Uni you can't just condense the time for a BA, no matter how brilliant you are. You spend time 3y on learning. If you're fast, you just learn more.