&gt; No, I refuse to buy lottery tickets.<p>&quot;Who Dares Wins&quot;<p>Like it or not, but there are no guaranteed outcomes in pretty much anything. Only when you&#x27;re paying for a lunch in a caffe it&#x27;s sort of guaranteed that you&#x27;ll get your calories.<p>When you&#x27;re paying for tuition you&#x27;re only getting a <i>chance</i> to learn something, and now it&#x27;s entirely up to you to use this chance (and still fail even by trying as hard as you can).<p>&gt; Smart consumers don&#x27;t spend £9,000 a year on lottery tickets.<p>Exactly. Smart consumers will first exhaust all the other options, and, most importantly, will gauge their chance to succeed in this race first before joining it.<p>&gt; the universal desire for a degree from an accredited college<p>This is a myth. Stop spreading it.<p>&gt; And in the Information Age, I have plenty of &quot;access to an infrastructure&quot; outside of the university walls.<p>Use it first. Go to the university only when all the other routes are exhausted. Otherwise universities are full of random people who do not really belong there.<p>&gt; There is not a single thing I learned academically from my pricey MIT degree that I could not have learned by reading textbooks and websites on my own.<p>It means that you failed miserably. Congratulations. You had a priceless opportunity to extort the knowledge from some of the best, most bleeding-edge researchers, who had hours of their precious time allocated for you alone.<p>But instead you did everything by the book, did your assignments, read your textbooks, attended your lectures - exactly the most stupid kind of stuff to do in any university, not just MIT.<p>Btw., I failed too, far too often I&#x27;m reading an obituary for a top scientist and realising that years ago I lost a unique opportunity to interrogate him thoroughly.