> It sure would be nice if a college education was about learning and growth and discovering oneself and all the hoopla they feed you during visits and orientation, but it's a structured credentialing system that involves professors for some reason, and it's effectively mandatory for making an above-median wage.College is what you make of it. It's 4 years to spend at least half of your waking hours learning new things. You can waste a bunch of that time and still get a credential with vanishing return, or you can invest all of that time in building highly valuable skills (while also getting the credential).
N=1: I was offered a $70K coding job out of high school. I made over 4x that amount at my first software job after graduation. They definitely weren't paying 4x more because of my degree, and most of my graduating class was making less than 100K. But it would have taken me longer than 4 years to get those skills and knowledge if I were working full time. More importantly, I would have had very few options a few years later when I got bored/burned-out with programming and decided to move into research.
College is a space to develop your human capital. The official curriculum is there as a guide and baseline, but it's your responsibility to use your course project time and especially free time in an effective way to build on top of that curriculum. Unfortunately, very few students understand this.