That's was a good read. I think these ideas are floating in the zeitgeist at the moment, and there's much to recommend them. I was always self-taught, but the things I learned at university are hard to learn by oneself I think. For example people outside the university will tend to read the things that agree with their point of view. They will not read things that disagree with them, or will always postpone them til it's too late. Also you don't have someone meticulously cross-examining your opinions/essays/work, challenging your thinking. Yes, people can do that online, I guess. But it's always superficial pub-level talk, and you can just shut them out. At uni, you hear what your professor has to say, you become more self-critical, you learn the proper skills of debate rather than the adjective-bashing that goes on online most times. I think at least I personally learned things at uni that I couldn't learn by myself, or that would take a long long time. Also people have said things to me like "before I did a PhD, I didn't know how to think; I thought I did, but I didn't". There's a lot of university-hating going on out there at the moment, and then there's people who have the exact opposite feelings, and it makes me wonder why that is, whether it's because of the different institutions and curricula, disciplines, countries, or just people being able to profit from different kinds of teaching methods, some more hands on than others, etc.