> Ok, I didn't mean to upset anyone when I wrote that little bit on college and I didn't mean to start some sort of debate.

Actually, thank you for doing so. We haven't had a good one of these in a while.

> Actually I went to one, and it was one of the most idiotic things I ever witnessed.

I can imagine.

> I just have a weird way of thinking that makes me nitpick everything. EVERYONE i know who has attended college has at least skipped one day to hang out with me for no important reason. I've stayed and been to many colleges. I used to live a mile and a half away from SUNY.

Even as much as you've been around colleges and universities, I think you'd discover that the outward image of college and what really goes on inside is frighteningly paradoxical. Sure, people party, and in college parties some of the stupidest things humankind ever does goes on. But that's not a reflection of college -- it's a reflection of those people, engaging in activities that reflect who they are, not what college is. I studied computer science (which is more engineering than science, at least in the area I focused on). There were VERY few party-goers in the crowd I hang out with, and the ones who were were responsible ones -- not the kind that get drunk and fall of frat house roofs. My point here is that, from the outside, you aren't going to see the knots of students hanging out in labs past midnight, working together to get a project done, having pizza delivered so they can eat but not lose time. You're not going to see the field trips photography classes are going to take to shoot film, nor the rehearsals for stage productions the theater students put on. You're not going to see the researchers in the library looking up technical articles in the endless shelves of periodicals, nor see the indescribably valuable synergy that can occur when you go one-on-one with a educated, personable, and enthusiastic instructor. THAT is what college is all about.

> Don't get me wrong, I believe kids actually do go to college to learn, but what can they learn that I can't by just going to libraries, watching public speakers, and basically just living?

A *LOT*. Actually there is precious little overlap between what you describe and what college can teach, except insofar as a college class assignment might involve doing some of the things you mention. What you describe teaches you facts. Knowledge. "Just living" gives you experience, which nothing else can teach anyway (but living through college *provides* experience at a phenomenally accelerated rate). The bulk of the college classes I took had a certain disregard for "the facts." The attitude is, "if you can look it up in a book, why should I make you memorize it?" This attitude varies from discipline to discipline. If you're studying medicine, you'd *better* have everything memorized. But for most fields, particularly mine, nobody there really cared if you didn't know some particular "fact" except insofar as not knowing it prevented you from knowing what they did want you to learn. What they cared about teaching was not knowledge but wisdom (for lack of a better word); they cared that you know *how* to do things. They cared that you know, as Wolfspirit mentioned in a previous post, "how to think." The things taught are designed to prod you into teaching yourself that and provide vast doses of experience on top.

You mentioned that the people you talk to can't tell you what they're learning. They may indeed be waltzing through college as easily as they can, which is certainly possible; but as likely as not, they couldn't even tell you anyway. Although it shouldn't be, high school is pretty much the end of "common" learning, where you learn things everyone else can be expected to learn. After just one year of my computer science program, I stopped being physically *able* to tell people who aren't in the field what I was learning. To this day, I have the utmost difficulty telling people what I do for a living, should "I'm a software engineer for a networking company" not be sufficient, which it often isn't. I certainly couldn't tell you what I was taught, which was much broader in scope even just within my field.

I guess the moral of this story is, don't deny yourself something so invaluable because a conspicuous few didn't make the best use of the opportunity they had every waking hour of the day. (Heck, sometimes the learning is so grueling anyway, that you can't help but overcompensate during the free time you do have.)

> Wolfspirit said something in his post about going to college for the learning experience and not for a good job. Why can't I do that without going to college?

Besides the gained access you'd have to resources and expertise otherwise unavailable to you, there's the sorry fact that, let's face it, you aren't going to spend the next four years of your life staying up in computer labs or buried in periodicals in the library. People tend to get so caught up in the possibilities of things that their probability is ignored. But even if you did, there is absolutely no substitute for being under the tutelage of experts in the fields you're studying, and being among similarly-minded individuals. That's as important as what you're actually taught.

> Why is college so important? Why is it, when someone has something negative to say about college they get yelled at?

I don't think either one of us was yelling. But it was something we were both speaking of adamantly, because it's something we both believe in so very strongly -- and, again, from experience. Then there's the experiences of people who didn't go to college. I can't tell you how many people I know didn't go and now regret it but can't go back. The thing about college is, the worst it can do is broaden your options for the future and expand your mind. Even if what you do for the rest of your life does not directly draw from what you learned in college, you've still gained something invaluable and irreplaceable.