It seems like college makes little sense. Some say college is all about education, but if thats so, people could easily learn everything just on their own. Its not as if we are in the past where books are incredibly expensive and so attending lectures is the only way to learn something.

Others say that education is about job signaling. If so, its a waste of time and money. Instead of 4 years of mild difficulty, it could easily be changed to where it is one year of incredibly stressful course work similar to the 1st year of law school.

But when it comes to education it seems to me that college serves little purpose at all. For a bachelors degree level of education, this is very easy to replicate on your own. All the textbooks area available for sale that the university uses and so the vast majority of the information a student would learn in college can just be learned from buying the textbooks.

Some may say that labs are not able to be replicated, but with covid, schools have switched to doing online labs. So its quite obvious that actually being in the lab isnt really all that important if colleges are giving credit for online labs.

Writing papers might be something that is thought to not be able to be replicated. But I disagree. While you wont get any feedback on writing on your own, if you read enough, you will learn how to write properly by the style of what you read. Which is really how most people learn how to write properly and is how I learned how to write law briefs. While I had some time where my professor would tell me what to do right, it was reading other cases and briefs that I learned how to write a good brief. So I dont think that you will be stuck at a preschool level of writing if you never get any professional feedback.