That's one of the things to do in college. Gaining a shiny degree that will help you get a better job is another. Meeting people who will help you in your career is yet another.
There are many reasons to go to college. Learning interesting stuff is just one of them.
> Meeting people who will help you in your career is yet another.
I predict the Internet will increasingly replace this traditional function of the college experience. And do it for, essentially, just the cost of Internet access service each month. Yes we'll have to use a web browser and click on the right links to the right sites, chat in topic-oriented forums, and then go do "meetups" in meatspace (Dr. Evil saying "lasers") to meet them face-to-face, become friends, learn from each other, collaborate together, micro-projects, trial projects, earn F2F credibility, put things up on our online portfolios, become ambiant, self-promote, self-educate, iterate, rinse, repeat. Goodbye 4-6 years of grinding and $100K in student debt.
I agree that traditionally going to college was a great way to meet people who've been filtered for certain qualities. But this tradition comes from an era when the Internet didn't exist. Computers didn't exist. Even radios and telephony didn't exist for the earliest periods in which universities existed and operated. But we have all that stuff now. We have frickin FaceTime and Skype and Google Hangouts and Reddit and email mailing lists, oh my! Let's all get to meeting each other, and filtering for the qualities we want, while bypassing that big honkin expensive middleman industry. I'm also seeing this trend with hackerspaces and makerspaces. Meetup.com is a big enabler.
The quantity and quality of programming courses available online right now - completely free of charge - is astounding to me. I taught myself to program in high school in the mid-to-late 90's, and while there was a ton of information available online even then, I still kind of wish stuff like Udacity, Coursera, Khan Academy, iTunes University and MIT OCW were available back then.
Still, I think the social aspects of college are hard to fully replicate online. For many people, interactions on places like Reddit, mailing lists, etc are somewhat too anonymous and random, while things like Skype and FaceTime are more for people who are already familiar with each other.
I do think the Internet has huge potential to fundamentally change the way we obtain education. It certainly has fundamentally changed the way we obtain information, but it hasn't changed the way we get marketplace-accepted education yet. I think that is coming.
Agreement. My "college friends" have all but disconnected, even though we are still nominally linked via Facebook(which arrived on campus around our second year). We've all ended up going in mostly unrelated directions. In the meantime, the internet has done unimaginable things for both my career and social life.
For help and research, there are online references, online discussions, online correspondence...even if it's all "informal" and done in an IRC channel or something, it's all out there and you can, potentially, spend 24 hours a day immersed in a subject.
And in making more connections, there's an odd feedback loop between the local gatherings and the online stuff. It can start at either end, but the two complement each other well by presenting different situations.
There are many reasons to go to college. Learning interesting stuff is just one of them.