> Thinking that listening to a radio program is exactly the same or better as a college course is the kind of thing you hear from people that haven't actually gone to college.
I've gone to college I agree with the GP that most gen. ed. college courses are mostly useless. Just the way they're structured usually means you never get a good picture of what you're learning and why. Instead, you usually learn to do a bunch of exercises, with little context about what the point of the exercises are.
They also introduce you to a lot of topics you may not have studied on your own, and give you the opportunity and resources to take them as far as you'd like. I spent a lot of years in universities and I never met a teacher who wasn't willing to spend at least some time with an interested student, or point them in the direction of materials for additional self-study.
Certain classes (particularly the calculus series and chemistry) were pretty exercise-laden but I don't remember anything else that wasn't somewhat obvious what the purpose was, or really many classes beyond science/math/foreign languages with much exercise-type homework. It's obvious with language classes why you're doing rote memorization. Calculus is pretty clearly an engineering weed-out gauntlet, and I have no idea why university chemistry is universally terrible. The context of humanities courses (kept separate from the occupational relevance) was usually obvious. Want to learn what different kinds of buildings are called? Take an architecture history course. Etc.
Mostly I remember undergrad classes as a bunch of 19 year olds who did about 2/3 of what they were assigned, and most of them took zero initiative. Sure, the first floor of the library was packed at night, but there aren't any books there. The stacks were basically ghost towns, and that is where the real learning goes down.
I've gone to college I agree with the GP that most gen. ed. college courses are mostly useless. Just the way they're structured usually means you never get a good picture of what you're learning and why. Instead, you usually learn to do a bunch of exercises, with little context about what the point of the exercises are.