> It isn't the case everywhere but I think the idea that university is required for success outside university is misleading, particularly for high school students. A lot of the knowledge is definitely very useful but life outside university tends to be about things that aren't in any books. University is orthogonal to life.

Outside of certain subjects where the ability to work is tied to the education, university is mostly about signalling that you're able to learn stuff. Note I didn't say that you learn stuff.

To the extent that I "learned" stuff at uni, it was quite superficial and due to the sheer quantity it ended up getting very exam focused. So people would learn how to numerically solve PDEs, but only enough to pass the exams, which of course could not test this knowledge in a sensible way. The format of answering five questions in three hours by hand while wearing formal academic clothes just isn't suited to how a lot of these things work.

There were a load of subjects like this, where the content itself was interesting, but you just had to do a load of context switching because of the nature of the degree. One exam is PDEs, another is hydro, thermo, electronics, and so on.

Nobody would be unable to learn any one of them, but many people found it soul crushing to do all of them. And that's a shame, because in the world of work I've never needed to dive deep on 6 or 8 subjects at once. At most it's one or two broad topics, done with sane tools, judged in a sane way.

So at the end of university I'd indexed a bunch of knowledge in engineering and business. Useful, but still only scratching the surface of what is in those fields. It also gives you a beginner level bullshit filter, which is maybe even more useful than the survey of knowledge. You won't give time to the crackpot who claims to have a perpetual motion machine, because although you might not have all of thermo down, you'll have a very good intuition that such machines aren't possible, and you will know which arguments sound right in the field. You might give the emdrive a bit of an investigation though.

The BS filter is especially useful in the social sciences. I did Economics and Management as part of my degree, and while I don't have a cohesive theory of how everything works, I can spot an overconfident crackpot from a mile away. People who oversimplify how the economy works, people who think they can explain it all, people who say they know what will happen. You will know where the weaknesses are in arguments simply by having read the back-and-forth.

As for the real value of university, I think it's hard to spot. I have a suspicion that if we forced a reduction in places, we'd be just as well off. All the knowledge that you're taught is free for everyone to read, and in the modern world you can fund the best explanation of anything on the internet. All those intuitions I mention above can be learned by anyone who bothers to do so. My working theory is that it's a form of intellectual hazing. Prove that you want to be part of this group (intellectuals).

Where previously someone reasonably smart and eloquent could be found at the end of high school, that person now needs to complete university to get a chance to do a whole swath of roles. So the person who could have taken a professional job at 18 now has to be 22 to get the same job. We can tell because there's firms like PWC who have a program to hire exactly such people. Or for instance I had a private banker in Switzerland who started as an apprentice doing work/study, that seemed to work perfectly fine and seems economically sensible. I once worked with a talented guy who didn't have a degree, and he had self-confidence issues because he didn't have a fancy Oxford degree. Others I've met have felt compelled to go back to uni after years of doing a job.