I love how varied university education can be. We definitely had very different experiences. I’ll just ramble some hand wavy thoughts, don’t take them too seriously.

• School in the US doesn’t have to be expensive, depending on circumstances. I went to UMass Amherst for a year (living on campus) before transferring to Worcester State (living at home). UMass was too expensive for my taste, and it was still quite a bit cheaper (in state) than private schools in the area you probably haven’t heard of (WPI, Clark, Assumption, Becker, Mount Holyoke, Amherst). State schools like Worcester State are much much cheaper by comparison, especially if you can finagle a way to live at home. I worked my way through school and had pretty small student loans at the end, about an order of magnitude less than others in my circle of friends. Order of magnitude is not an exaggeration. Living at home was a convenient option that I was fortunate to have, but everyone in my circle had that opportunity as well. But they prioritized other things. :-)
• The most important thing I ever did was learn how to learn. This made most courses stupidly easy, in the sense that I still learned some things but I spent very little time on it. I don’t consider myself particularly bright, but figuring out how to do active reading in high school felt like a cheat code.
• I very rarely tried anything new because I knew what I liked, and that’s OK. The only real friends that I stay in contact with from college are my wife, my boss and my mentor (where my mentor was from graduate school). (Sorry @jfredett, fellow woo stater, but we haven’t seen each other in a loooong time. :-))
• I enjoyed my time in school overall. In part because I liked taking classes and expanding my exposure to topics I wanted to know more about in a structured way. But really, I liked school because I had so much god damn time. I always tried to arrange my schedule on a Tues/Thurs or Mon/Wed/Fri rhythm. Sure, I ended up with 12 hour (or more) days, but then I had alternating days off. Homework and exam prep always happened in spirts, so I’d almost always have huge huge chunks of time where I could just do whatever I wanted to. I look back on those days with longing. These days (with a full time job), I need to be much more efficient and ruthless with how I spend my time.
• I almost never went to office hours, and disliked working in groups. I think I was too stubborn for office hours, because I would just do my best to work it out on my own. I disliked working in groups because the incentive structure was always completely off. Occasionally I worked with other motivated students, and those were great.
• I enjoyed study groups in large part because I got to teach others. This reinforced the material even more for me. Win-win. But I didn’t do this often.
• At every school I went to, I always found my little corners of quiet. I loved those so much, especially when nobody else was around. They really helped me a lot. In my three years at Worcester State, almost nobody went to the second floor of the library during the day. It was bliss.
• Find a way to be engaged with what you’re spending your time on. You’ll be happier and so will the people around you. (Easier said than done, but it has always come naturally to me. More than that, I’ve found that I tend to be surrounded by people that do the same. I don’t know how that happened, but it’s happened several times now, so I’m pretty sure it isn’t coincidence.)

I hope this blows up. I’m in a rather similar situation to the one you were in and I hope to learn from your experience. Thank you for sharing!

University teaches you as @burntsushi says Active reading, but also Dialectical Reasoning and the process of not accepting something as true until you have attempted to both prove and disprove it. That process of Proof and Disproof is critical to being able to discern reality, and will allow you to cut through a lot of BS.

Being able to move past being spoon fed perfect truth is part of the steps after university.

University taught me one lesson the value of which I didn’t realize until later.

It was the ability to put up with the indeterminate and arbitrary.

Exams. Essays. Deadlines. Waking up. Going to sleep. Revising. Writing a thesis. Completing a course module. Completing a minor subject.

Life is many things, but it is some times about tolerating things. Random stupidity. Rules that make no sense, that seem to just be, and you can’t do anything about it.

To me, university was like a microcosm of the arbitrary and insane, a boot camp for the real world that, just like university, makes no sense at times.

Of course it was a vault of knowledge like no other. The depth offered by its courses took me beyond imagination. While computer science is not rocket surgery, the scholarly methods I learnt I still cherish to this day. When I lacked motivation, the school gave me a deadline. When I was out of my depth, it gave help.

I know I could have taught myself most of it, but it would have been under my direction, and I know for certain that university educators have a better sense of direction than I. I would have, most likely, studied myself into a corner.

I see the author begrudge university for the same abject senselessness in its rules and values. To me, that apparent senselessness, alongside the possibility to learn so many things, is priceless.

Though they might not have realized it just yet I think they too have learnt this lesson.

I am in exact sam situation. Posting more when i come home from uni.

I also hated the academic side when I attended, but one of the greatest benefits I got out of university was being in a little village with lots to do, everything accessible on foot, surrounded by friends. It’s a state of things that has a beautiful quaint aspect to it, especially when you consider how disparate our connections grow afterwards. If not for the high price tag, I might encourage people to go just for that experience. You can learn throughout your entire life, but it’s hard to find a similar social environment.