You proposal has the built-in assumption that the central value that the university provides is the certificate at the end. I don't think this is true: a much more important value that at least good universities provide is having been exposed to the whole intellectual environment most of the days for years.
Such a vanishingly small group of people actually take advantage of that. Most of them are partying and then taking the easiest electives for the easy A. We'd be better off just evaluating people on what they actually know.
I'd argue that the partying you're referring to is a facet of the biggest value-add of going to the best school you can get into and afford: meeting people of similar or higher social status. Private schools know this: you create a high barrier of entry via tuition, use that glut of cash to create an attractive environment, then use the excess from the rich kids to subsidize the smart kids. Now you've got a breeding ground where future founders can meet future investors. It's a win-win for everyone involved.
That perspective is completely formed from my reality. I went to a private university for stupid reasons ("eh, it's closer to the beach than the public school"), witnessed first hand the advantages that the private school was offering me relative to my highschool friends who went the public school path, and took advantage of them.
If your lived experience differs, maybe you should explain how, rather than dismissing mine out of hand.
Your argument for university is that people might meet rich people that might essentially sponsor them. That is an absurd argument and again it's detached from reality and again the argument is just absurdly dumb since you are suggesting people that can't afford it should pay $40k a year for this privilege.
The point of a university -- it's in the name -- is to learn a universal method of acquiring knowledge. Ask any education researcher and they will tell you the dirty secret: it doesn't matter what you major in. Whether you learn this method by studying parts of the human body or the intricacies of computer code is immaterial. For (almost?) all sciences, it'll be outdated before you leave the place anyways.
So indeed, the end cert doesn't quite matter so much as going through the process.
Learning math rewires your brain. Math doesn't get outdated.
> is to learn a universal method of acquiring knowledge
It's about learning how to think. Acquiring knowledge and solving problems are two different things. Caltech is about the latter. Like learning how to build a rocket is not the goal, it's about figuring out how to build a rocket.
The central utility a unuversity class provides is the syllabus. If you know WHAT you need to learn, you can learn it on your own. I never went to classes except test days and yet I was in a very high percentile on my exit exams because I studied everything in the syllabus for all my classes.
The other utility is networking. That one I didnt do so good with.
Personally, I like the pay to test and prep suggestion. Would have worked great for me and I would not have had to deal with vindictive professors who graded me down for not attended their awful lectures even though there was no attendance grade.
Yes, it is. Many jobs want degrees. A lot of students just want the paper.
I wish people wanted the intellectual experience, but I had to do a second major in the liberal arts to even get a hint of that, and even then people really weren't that invested.
Now, I didn't go to an Ivy League school, but it still ranks pretty well nationally.
My studying experience is that if you really "actively work towards it", you can "avoid being exposed" to this environment. ;-) But if you are this kind of student, going to a university is obviously a huge waste of time and money.
