College is not just for signaling. The world is much richer in people competent in Electrical Engineering as a result, something which very few would be competent in if everyone cooperated in not getting a degree.

You are conflating vocational training with degree acquisition, which sometimes overlap, but usually do not.

If the only thing you get out of college is a piece of paper saying you graduated then you did something very wrong.

If after four years in the work force, you only learned what you would have gotten from a BA program, you're probably digging ditches.

Really? Where in the work force do you get to learn about GIS software, play with expensive photography equipment, sit with scientists, philosophers, historians, literary critics, etc., to discuss their fields, not to mention chatting over dinner with all kinds of diverse 18–22 year-olds who in a decade or two will be actors, politicians, artists, diplomats, company founders, and so on? What job do you have whose members are all involved in myriad dance troupes and music groups constantly putting on $5 shows and concerts? What job dumps a stream of free co-worker–written literary magazines, political and scientific reviews, and a daily newspaper in your door box?

I don’t know any work place as diverse as the most boring monoculture of an engineering college.

People don't stop being interesting when they get their diplomas. At my last job, one of my coworkers (in his mid 20's) already held local office part-time; another fronted a mildly successful band. The writing quality at school newspapers tends to be really bad, unless you're at a good school (stop by a state university campus and pick up a copy some time).

I agree that not all jobs have interesting people. But the people who are interesting in school tend to stay interesting. In fact, they're more fun to deal with once their goal changes from "Continue getting financial aid / parental aid" to "Do something that pays well."

Plorkyeran claimed that college is about more than a diploma, which you responded to by saying that you learn things on the job that you wouldn’t learn in college. My retort was that colleges are incredibly diverse, and enable many conversations and experiences that simply wouldn’t all happen in any other single place, and the best you can do is to tell me that people are still interesting after they graduate?

I’m sorry, but the constitutional law scholar, the electrical engineer, the chamber singer, the neurobiology review editor, the congressional staffer, the south asian dancer, the ancient babylonian historian, the photographer, and the basketball player aren’t going to all be sitting at lunch talking about the lecture they just listened to about Kant with their venerable philosophy professor in any job I’ve ever heard of.

Yes, there are interesting people everywhere (in the supermarket, for instance, or at a rock concert or hiking through a national park). That doesn’t mean that the college experience can be easily replaced anywhere else I can think of. Which is not to suggest that college is essential, but only that it has value beyond certification or specific curricula.

> ... they're more fun to deal with once their goal changes from "Continue getting financial aid / parental aid" to "Do something that pays well."

Both of those sound like awfully boring goals. I’d be pretty disappointed in any friend of mine whose chief ambition in life was to make lots of money.

But you can't assume college is the most efficient for obtaining other things. It is however guaranteed to give you a degree.

What are you talking about? "It" is hardly guaranteed to give you a degree.

And honestly, efficiency is overrated. For one thing, it assumes that you know what to optimize for. For another, there are all sorts of fools on the Internet who seem content to scrap an "inefficient" system that does something, for nothing that does nothing.