This is completely wrong. Universities are tremendously useful and do many great things for society and humanity. I'm not going to provide evidence because I think that any reasonable person will agree with me.
You're conflating Comp Sci with programming. I think it's pretty clear you don't need CS to be a productive developer, especially if the kind of work you're interested in doing involves building small to medium size websites and CRUD apps using other people's libraries and frameworks. Try to go beyond that however and you will quickly find out why so many people value a formal education.
I was more getting at the fact that for probably the majority of people who go to university, they're pretty much wasting their time and money because unless they're looking to do something that can't be self-taught or learned on-the-job, they could be gaining the same skills (and maybe even getting paid for it) without putting themselves in debt that they'll spend a decade or more paying off.
For example, all the lessons capote claims to have learned doing CS at uni, I learned on the job while getting paid for it.
I have no doubt that a uni education would benefit anyone, I'm just saying that I think for the vast majority of people going to uni, the costs they're ultimately paying don't outweigh the benefits they gain, unless they're going to uni to enter a high paying field which requires a degree to enter the industry at all such as law or medicine. Unless the career you want absolutely requires a degree, you probably don't need one.
But certainly, university is not the only way to learn. The issue is that there are often too many applicants to jobs already, and recruiters use a university degree as a filter. I think this may be unfair to some people, but the companies also value their time.
If you can't see the value in university, good for you; nobody's forcing you to go.
But, you didn't make an argument for your point in your last statement, and instead made a vague, mysterious assertion:
> Universities are tremendously useful and do many great things for society and humanity.
You even explicitly pointed out this fact:
> I'm not going to provide evidence because I think that any reasonable person will agree with me.
I wouldn't contest it's useful, but I'd definitely feel that for most it's probably not worth the price of a US university.
But what we have is an unholy chimera of academia and occupational training where _everybody_ is pushed to go through it, not just the academics. That's where this two-faced mess of inapplicability comes from.
Doesn't make them worthless, or even close to it.
Studies have shown that the effect on universities is that "administrative expenses" have increased to absorb around 90% of the additional tuition funds coming in from loan-bearing students.
The parent is not pessimistic nor conspiratorial. This is observed behavior on the part of the universities.
They also ran a fancy hotel that charges many hundreds per night, right in the heart of campus. They consistently failed to make a profit for years and then totally bungled recent renovations, going 3x over budget and delivering behind schedule. Here's an interesting (and admittedly biased) blog post documenting that sorry saga: http://www.dartblog.com/data/2012/01/009957.php
Throughout the country, tuition has risen many times over in the past few decades, but the money isn't going to hiring more professors. It's going to hiring more and more college administrators and staff, and on loss-making sports programs that go well beyond recreational athletics. Every single type of minority possible had at least one administrative department dedicated to them, each with multiple staff members, and often with physical plants. Many (most?) of these were straight-up indoctrination outfits, pushing critical-theory Marxism on students, teaching them that they're the victims of the white establishment, and fanning the flames of campus protests.
Don't take my word, ask the American Association of University Professors:
>The increase in spending on administrative functions, coupled with a decline in state funding relative to institutional operating expenses, is clearly connected to the continuing increases in tuition prices on many campuses. As we have noted in this report on several occasions in recent years, faculty pay is not driving up tuition costs. In fact, the stagnant salaries paid to full-time faculty members combined with the increasing use of lower-paid part-time and non-tenure-track faculty appointments have been reflected in the lowered relative spending on instruction documented earlier in this section. But don’t just take our word for it. The most recent report from the Delta Cost Project concluded that “faculty salaries were not the leading cause of rising college tuitions during the past decade. Increased benefits costs, nonfaculty positions added elsewhere on campus, declines in state and institutional subsidies, and other factors all played a role.”
Source: https://www.aaup.org/reports-publications/2013-14salarysurve...
This guy from the New York Times agrees with me: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-re...
An NPR article: http://www.npr.org/2012/06/26/155766786/whats-driving-colleg...
The LA Times: http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/12/opinion/la-oe-dreifu...
