Colleges conflate college with professional school. The first time I visited my alma mater as a high school senior, I told them I wanted to be a programmer when I grew up, and they said "You'll want our computer science program, then." Nobody ever recommended me to a technical school instead, or told me that the CS program would teach me very basic programming, lots of academically interesting stuff about operating systems and electronics and math, and practically nothing that prepared me for a career.
They were perfectly happy to take my money and let me believe that I was learning professional skills.
Classes taught me in one area. Student-organized study groups, living with classmates, taking part in on and off-campus programming competitions, and working on side projects with the people I met at school taught me in other areas. Both were part of "college", to me; I wouldn't have done all the campus-life stuff if I hadn't been there.
CS itself was always presented to me as the science that acts as a basis for the more practical engineering side of things. It was supposed to be the theory underlying the practice. That's what I paid for, and that's what I think I got (with the remainder of my experience being what I made of it). So, college could've been useless crap. For me, it wasn't.
Sure, and some of my classmates did the same. I didn't, because I foolishly assumed that going to classes and doing homework would teach me the things I needed to know and I could relax the rest of the time, and no one ever told me otherwise until it was too late.
I thought I was paying for an education. I was actually paying to hang out in the vicinity of an education, while being distracted with useless busywork.
My GEs included a lot of critical thinking courses. Maybe they influenced me more than I realized at the time. Without the classes from my degree, my practical knowledge would be built on sand. I feel like the things I learned in class provide a solid foundation for building upon, but just a foundation. The nature of what I was learning became clear as I was doing it, and I could see the delta between what I was doing and the future I wanted to aim for. As I went on, I could also see how the theory could be leveraged to get me where I wanted to be.
