I see some people in the comments claim that you can give yourself a good liberal arts education outside of college, using public libraries and the internet, but I'm skeptical. One commenter even repeated a quote about college being a waste of money from Good Will Hunting... which of course is a work of fiction. I attended a state university and still live relatively close to the campus, with a library card for the public library and surrounding library system; there's just no comparison: the university library has vastly, vastly more books and papers of an intellectual nature than the public library system. Moreover, university students have vastly more access to online resources of an intellectual nature than the general public. I would be extremely hard pressed now to access and re-read many of the things I read in school. It might be possible, but I'd have to buy most of them myself, probably online, for an obscene amount of money.
College doesn't make you smart. I'm not sure to what extent it can teach you to think critically either. Those abilities may be innate, and I brought them with me to college. However, there are books and papers and ideas that I was exposed to in college that I never would have been exposed to if left to my own devices. I didn't even know they existed! Some of those books and papers and ideas were crucial to the development of my thinking. They influenced and changed me. This is a principal value of a college education. Your professors have spent decades reading and studying things that you've never heard of before, and they let you know about it. Even if important intellectual works were not paywalled behind a college tuition — which I admit is an unfortunate situation for the public — those works might get lost in obscurity anyway, because popular culture and market capitalism have little or no interest in promoting them to you.
Students need guidance. There are a lot of people who are self-motivated, including myself, but that's not the same thing as self-guiding. You can guide yourself into a dead end if you don't already know where you're going.
College doesn't make you smart. I'm not sure to what extent it can teach you to think critically either. Those abilities may be innate, and I brought them with me to college. However, there are books and papers and ideas that I was exposed to in college that I never would have been exposed to if left to my own devices. I didn't even know they existed! Some of those books and papers and ideas were crucial to the development of my thinking. They influenced and changed me. This is a principal value of a college education. Your professors have spent decades reading and studying things that you've never heard of before, and they let you know about it. Even if important intellectual works were not paywalled behind a college tuition — which I admit is an unfortunate situation for the public — those works might get lost in obscurity anyway, because popular culture and market capitalism have little or no interest in promoting them to you.
Students need guidance. There are a lot of people who are self-motivated, including myself, but that's not the same thing as self-guiding. You can guide yourself into a dead end if you don't already know where you're going.