Well, if you actually want to learn, there is always the vast swaths of the Internet. Virtually everything here is free, and nobody will care until you do something impressive with your knowledge.

As for universities, they will likely stay as signaling mechanisms until society finds a more efficient way to signal the things that universities do. This is a worldwide pattern that has emerged, and to the extent you see deviations from it it's usually situations like e.g. getting into Tokyo University is already so incredibly difficult that some employers will just accept your letter of admission itself as a sufficient signal of your value to the firm and hire you and let you skip the whole getting a degree thing.

What does university graduation signal? Some combination of raw intelligence, conscientiousness, and ability to conform (not against the "I have beef with the standard model of physics" nonconformance, so much as the "I will not physically assault the professor for telling me I'm wrong in class" nonconformance). Admission to a selective university signals you had these traits even earlier and with greater strength than your peers.

I'm going to underline something from your own article here, which is that you went to an excellent university and got near the top of your class despite hating it. It is an incredibly rare psychological profile in the wild to be able to war-of-attrition your way through so many elite classes, while having virtually zero interest in the material themselves. Any employer would be drooling at the mouth to hire you because you sound reliable even in a pinch. Alas they cannot tell you apart from the ultranerd who gets all As because she genuinely finds all knowledge presented to her endlessly fascinating - but she's probably a good hire too, for different reasons!

But, almost by definition, you can't really signal that kind of ability if you only ever do things you want to do... And most of the things most people in the world want to do most of the time aren't very economically valuable from the doer's perspective. Everyone wants to eat, nobody wants to grow crops, etc.

There is definitely a lot of information on the internet, but I wouldn’t undervalue the benefits of being in a classroom with a small group of bright people focusing on the same topic every week.

Probably the best class I took for my philosophy degree was a 3 hour metaphysics course, held once every Wednesday. There were maybe 6-7 people in the class, and the discussions we got into were incredibly educational.

I don’t think reading a bunch of books and web pages about metaphysics would have been 10% as insightful. Maybe with talking to an AI, you could get that up to 20%…but still, it’s not the same.

I agree. I would even go so far as to suggest there is far more information availiable on the internet than you can get in a degree. Mostly it's inside pirated textbooks and academic papers.

I've been self-teaching cryptography since I graduated with an engineering degree, and it's amazing how woefully unequipped a degree program alone leaves you compared to the information that's just out there