Deep down, college has absolutely nothing to do with earning a degree that certifies your ability to perform a specialized task, or hold knowledge in a narrow field.
You want training for a job to make money? Go to a trade school, don't bother with a university.
At a university, you learn exactly how badly and why you'd be completely screwed over by the world if you weren't attending the university. It's actually kind of a dark system. Not to get melodramatic, but universities are how the state select those who will be referred to and treated as the adults/citizens of the society. Sure, if you don't attend, you receive "equal protection" under law, but if you go to a university(and especially if you enter one of the cults within the university) you will see just how much more equal you are than those that haven't gone.
University attendance becomes a compulsion once you see just how abusive the world is to those that don't go. Colleges are an extension of the ancient system of Circles. Once you get accepted to a university, you're part of that circle; get into honors classes, part of a smaller circle; join professional clubs, part of an even smaller circle; join a social club, part of an even smaller yet circle. There are clubs in Oxford that literally limit membership to TWO(2) people, do you understand? If you hate the exclusionary nature of the world and don't want to add to it, a university education is not for you. Look at the caps worn at graduation; everyone's head has been flattened. This isn't accidental imagery.
The education you learn at a university is nothing on how to do your job, but instead it's to learn that you deserve to receive $40/hr and not $8 because you're more "human". It teaches you to put up ads to advertise your own services instead of joining a company that pays you a fraction of what you can earn yourself. Though, If you're planning on doing intellectual, high-risk & reward work, then the university will teach you of how titantic and unchangeable the world system is that you will have to join and play along nicely in if you want to succeed in this game.
Colleges are for learning how to be an adult among adults; how to be a citizen with as much a say as anyone else. At college, you live in a little city populated pretty much by others in your age/peer group. You will never experience this in another setting. It isn't necessary, and can be a complete waste of time. It can either be liberating and fun, or if you've already been liberated and had your fun when you were younger, the college atmosphere can be a return to what high school felt like. Everyone is maturing at different rates, and another thing college teaches is that you either join the herd-mass and have a great time, or you walk your own way and although it will be lonely and difficult, you will not regret it.
A university is a formal pageant, it's not really a school. Learning at college is a self-starting thing, so why do people equate college with school where you'd be yelled at if you didn't do your homework? You really are there to meet the other people who have relatively the same socio-economic status and political/religious views as you, and then to join with these people in factions to further government/business policies to their liking. The only way to get things the way you want is to do the same, and the easiest way is to go to a university to meet like-minded people, and pool your resources. You will learn how powerful you are, and how you are the one who gives up your power. You will learn how people around you will live their lives, and endure their struggles, based on the decisions you make that will affect their interest rates, loan payments, school tuition, and all the stuff that brings people down; College lets you be the one stepping on your friends.
College is an initiation, and every real initiation comes from inside oneself...So figure out for yourself whether you need college to feel and hold yourself up like an equal.