<p>couldn’t you just read all the required books and teach yourself the material?</p>
<p>why spend all the money?</p>
<p>Ask will hunting</p>
<p>The point of ivy-league isn’t education.</p>
<p>You could just read the books and not go to any school. The reason people go to post-secondary institutions is to PROVE they know the material and get a big shiny degree they can impress employers with.</p>
<p>That’s kinda how Stanford was founded, wasn’t it?</p>
<p>I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t have nearly enough self-discipline to do all that reading and writing papers on my own. It’s one thing if you have a deadline and a structured system, but why stay up until 3 in the morning writing about Hemingway when you could do it tomorrow…oh, tomorrow you’re going out with friends, then next week…oh, next week you’re busy…do you really need to write that paper anyway? Then it kind of snowballs into not finishing some of the books, then to none of them, etc. Not only is college an awesome experience that I wouldn’t want to miss, but it forces discipline on the less-than-perfect.</p>
<p>there’s also the matter of being educated by your peers. Elite schools also attract elite students== great debate, great questions, and a lot of encouragement to step beyond what you might normally have thought yourself capable of.</p>
<p>A large part of this is being able to do research with professors, esp. famous ones. And the biggest other kick is…the connections. :)</p>
<p>Also, your “ivy-league education” wouldn’t be for “free” as it would “cost” you A LOT of time to teach yourself the material. Who would you ask if you had questions? How do you really teach yourself?</p>
<p>If you wanna do business later, the network you’d build in one of these schools, you wouldn’t get by reading material at home.</p>
<p>Prospective employers will be concerned about your lack of pretty documents.</p>
<p>An Ivy education is going to cost you $1.50 in late charges at the library.</p>
<p>(Couldn’t resist)</p>
<p>The purpose of college is certification, not education. Anyone can go to any of the lectures at nearly any university for free - yet this is very rarely done. Consider, there are thousands of students aspire to get into MIT, yet Cambridge residents don’t flood into audit MIT classes. </p>
<p>This is because the real value of going to college is not the education, but the certification. People want to have a certification showing that they are high potential candidates at certain universities.</p>
<p>Well for one, I think that going to uni is good because it helps stimulate discussion and deeper analysis of various subjects. Yeah, you could just read the textbooks and be done with it. You’d probably know the subject. But would you understand it? Sure I could just read the essays in my philosophy textbook and I’d know the person’s argument, but I would not get to learn the finer points of it. Nor would I be able to hear different points of view as you do in a discussion section. I think that’s a huge part of college: learning to listen to other peoples’ views.</p>
<p>Not to mention, as others have noted, that you still wouldn’t get that sheepskin that certifies your knowledge of a subject. At the very least you should go to community college and get an associate’s degree, since almost any job that does not pay minimum wage will want at least that.</p>
<p>If you go to lectures, your professors will hopefully explain things in a way that you hadn’t thought about, is deeper, makes you more interested/passionate, and/or is more accurate/precise. I know that I self-studied a subject before, and I benefited a lot when I took a class on it because of the lectures/teacher. I had not liked the subject before, but I now love it. I understand it better and my teacher made me excited to learn about the subject.</p>
<p>Sure, Will Hunting could understand everything about math by himself. But I know I couldn’t. He’s a genius, unlike me.</p>
<p>I don’t think that any employer is going to take your word for it that you are really a qualified doctor or attorney or accountant if you don’t have a university degree. I’m not saying that you can’t self-study those things, but it’s too much of a liability for them without some kind of uniform standardized accreditation.</p>