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There are so many more ways to find "structure, community, mentorship, hands-on practice, fun." Personally I dropped out of university and started a non-profit society at the age of 20. I created my own structure, attracted my own community, found mentors, got a lot of hands-on real world practice and had a lot of fun. The problem I see is the belief that universities have some sort of monopoly on these things, and a lot of people once they finish school feel lost because they don't know how to find it all elsewhere. It's absolutely possible to find other ways that will foster a lifetime of fulfillment.

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High school AP teacher here. Many of my students take AP to stand out to the colleges, parents buy in, literally, to this idea. The future college students themselves take AP so they can skip the required courses (to the detriment of the humanities curricula) and go straight into their desired major. Each stakeholder takes this amorphous "college" thing and projects their own worldview onto it so that in the end it simply becomes what each chooses to believe it is and that makes it easier to turn into a commodity; a standardized nothingness that by definition must be losing value.

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