It is impossible to answer your questions. I would have had different experiences. I would have also said those different experiences were formative. Nor do I think it's useful to compare the "worth" of one life to another. Whose life is more worthy, yours, or that of one of your grandparents? Would you go to someone and say "my life is more worthy than yours"? Might your alternative self punch you in the nose for saying that?

I can, without doubt, say that I would have had a different life if my high school had been organized along the lines of a German Gymnasium school than the liberal arts tradition of the US. So of course I would have had yet a different life if I had "something other than high school".

BTW, I do not like your seemingly self-centered view. Public education doesn't exist only for my own "worth", but also for the benefit of society. Street signs, warnings, and public notices are more effective if (nearly) everyone is literate. One thread in pubic education is to develop an informed citizen. Another thread is to train workers at the public expense. A third is to keep cheap child labor from the workforce. A fourth is to indoctrinate children that the common good is a worthy goal. ;)

Nor do I think your question is a useful one, for policy or decision making purposes. "Could" is a question of a non-zero probability. Benjamin Franklin had no formal higher level education, and look what he managed. So sure, I "could" have been like Franklin and managed on my own. But the retrospective logic to answer "could" doesn't help answer the relevant policy question "would", or for the decision making at the time "should I take these classes, or CLEP out and enter college early?"

For me, it's pretty simple. I wanted to be a math professor. (I changed my mind when I was about 20.) Either I stay in high school, where I can take college-level courses for free, either as dual-enrolled or through AP test credits, and take classes that guarantee me in-state scholarship, or I get a job, ... or I enter the debt hole.

Sure, there are more options than that. My parents, close relatives, and neighbors have never been to college. We had no contacts in any of the careers that interested me. I knew no programmers other than hobbyists like myself. I didn't know any other options. Even now, knowing more, I don't know what I would have done if I decided to skip high school.

In that context, I can also imagine (without any basis in fact) that you had more options available to you. Perhaps your parents had money, or you had better connections to jobs that interested you, or didn't think that $40,000+ in school debt would be a problem.

But now we're far away from your original point, which is that you "don't remember learning much of anything" and therefore agree that "smart kids should skip high school." I disagree - I do remember leaning a lot of things. Since you say you went to a much better school than mine, you must have learned things as well, even if you've since forgotten it. You've now said that you haven't forgotten it, and attended classes. I don't know how you can say that you didn't learn anything from class. You say you didn't study, which means you have to have learned things from being in class and doing homework.