This question has many answers. My insight to what a University or College is actually for, is that the experience is whatever you make of it.
Some people attend universities for status reasons.
For example, if you say that you are the first in your family to attend a higher learning establishment, you become more esteemed in the minds of those you are addressing. Not only for status reasons, but this frame of thinking also leads people to universities for achieving goals higher than their ancestors did. Once able to account for their new achievements of higher learning, not only can they impress their public, but also their own families. Many of these students go to the full extreme, by living on or near campus, joining fraternities or sororities, living the wild weekends of partying with their new friends, and so on. For the student s advantage, a university is also a good excuse to explore life away from home, on their own, by their own rules.