Great post! Hopefully, at least a few students and parents will stop frantically running of the educational hamster wheel for a moment and consider your comments and experience.
I think many of your points can be generalized to the value of an undergraduate experience at any school. One can even extend that argument to the pre-college years. There is very little vocational training that occurs throughout our educational experience (excluding professional and some graduate schools). How does reading Shakespeare as a high school freshman prepare an individual for evaluating the debt structure of a target company?
The educational experience certainly has value in building a thoughtful, inquisitive, well-rounded person; but I think you are right to question - was that worth the toll in dollars, mental health and opportunity costs? Particularly at a prestigious university. I think that is central to the concerns about the rising costs of college, saddling young people with tremendous debt and then tossing them out into a world with a nice diploma to hang on their wall, but few, if any real job skills.
That being said, what other option(s) do you have? You can play the game, get your undergrad degree and recognize that the real vocational training happens after that. Or, you can take the high risk path of skipping college and going straight into the work force or entrepreneurship. Problem is, good luck finding jobs that will pay well or have a path to attaining good pay; and good luck securing loans for your business with little more than a high school degree. So, like it or not, college is still the best option.
Then, do you go the Ivy path, or a non-Ivy path? For business and technical degrees, the Ivy path is statistically going to pay off in higher earnings down the road. Only you can decide if the toll is (or was) worth it. And that is going to be an entirely individual judgement.
Hopefully, the thoughts you’ve shared are just for the benefit of those seeking information about the college experience, and not reflective of you having given up along the path of school and work. You have assets that many do not have, including a great education, a degree from a prestigious university and an incredible intellect that got you those things.
It also helps to remember that a job is not the destination in this process. It’s actually just another waypoint in a journey that will include subsequent jobs, maybe going back to graduate/professional school, maybe starting your own business, etc.