I get it.

One of the things I was lucky to have as a part of my college
experience was access to a group of professors who, while they
certainly were not on the cutting edge of their fields in terms of
research, cared a lot about good teaching. I wasn't an lit major, or
a linguistics major, or a French major, but I was able to take
courses in contemporary literature, history of the English language,
and modern French literature with people who were, taught by experts
in those fields who were there for the sole purpose of doing so.

Then there was the course I took that was ostensibly a political
science course, titled simply "General seminar." General seminar was
a 1 credit course taught by one of our two political science
professors. The only required prerequisite was an invitation. He
taught the course generally once a year, and he'd invite 5-6
students, generally juniors and seniors, to literally come over to
his house once a week, eat dinner, and discuss a book that was the
chosen topic for the semester. There was a rotation for who was
supposed to be the facilitator for the evening, but that tended to be
an easy job. With ~5 hand-picked, upper division college studnets
from multiple majors, discussion generally chose its own direction
after the initial introduction and maybe a couple general questions
to the group to bootstrap things.

Because I came in to college with 8 college credits already from
having taken the calculus sequence at one of the local colleges,
rather than screw around with AP, I was nearly a semester ahead of
everyone else in my cohort when classes started freshman year. These
were not introductory courses, so, often, I'd be the only non-major
in the room. Even so, I was held to every bit the same standard as
they were.

With only 5 professors in the entire math department, the catalog
offerings were mostly limited to the basics: calculus I-III, linear
algebra, abstract algebra I-II, differential equations, geometry,
probability, mathematical statistics I, real analysis, and a course
in foundations that was a capstone course. I took literally all of
those, due to having started with those 8 extra credits.

I won't say it was a plus or a minus, but one property of going to a
school with only 1200 students is that people will get to know each
other. I swear, when I was in college, more people knew my name than
whose names I knew. But, that also led to me being able to take
independent study courses in elementary field theory, introductory
Galois theory, and axiomatic set theory.

Oh, and the foundations course? Yeah, that was a weird combo of like,
a month of elementary number theory, followed by a course in point
set topology. The topology portion was taught via the Moore method.
To this day, I still remember standing up in front of the class (all
5 of us ), and giving what was, and probably still is, to this day,
the world's worst correct proof that the real line is connected.
The classroom was a small auditorium, equipped with blackboards that
rolled up to reveal a second set of blackboards behind them. That
gave me 4 blackboards to fill up, and fill them up, I did! But, by
golly, when I put my piece of chalk down, Theorem 23 was proved, and
C (for "continuum") was well and truly known to be connected!

The point is, although I said in another comment that I now believe I
made a suboptimal choice by going to the school I did, given that I
was at a SLAC and not a large, research university, I also believe I
took full advantage of the resources and strengths of the school I
did go to. You might say I learned something about how to think and
formulate ideas during my undergrad, but I'd be willing to bet many
of those in my graduating class just did it for the piece of paper.
You know, the key that unlocks the gateway to the middle class.

But, who am I to question them? :)