For the crowd that tends to be frequenting places like HN, I still believe college to very much be worth it. There are many viable paths to almost any outcome, but college is a rare time where you are constantly surrounded by opportunity with minimal effort: these opportunities include being exposed to new ideas, meeting new people as peers, meeting new people as mentors, and jobs that can make you money or jobs that can prove exceptionally meaningful. Not to mention that it’s a generically good tool for passing a baseline for many people in many circumstances (job applications, cold reach outs, meeting the parents — any circumstance where you are a stranger, it signals that you are more likely to be responsible than not knowing whether you went to college).

Of course, it’s possible to eschew these opportunities, but if you ever have a moment of clarity to try and live life a little better, the opportunities are there within reach. At any later point in life, these things can be hard to come by serendipitously, and they tend to require a relatively steep active effort.

In general, upfront life investment is exceptionally valuable, and the (all encompassing) human gestation period easily extends through college age in modern society. I think the issue of its worth is typically for people that were underserved in their grade school years, which is probably a decently large percentage of the country.