I used to say stuff like this, but now I think it's mostly a lie I would tell myself. For most people, the "experience" of college/university is basically the a four-year party (or five- or six-...). For those who attend elite schools, they get a networking benefit. Most people aren't learning anything in classes, nor are they learning much outside of class beyond their ethanol tolerance.

I think you stumbled onto a big truth, though: college kids have by and large zero "real world" experience outside of contrived scenarios posed by their teachers/coaches, so college classes can often devolve into the Chinese Room thought experiment with students memorizing the lookup table without having any concrete idea of what they are talking about, based on lack of experience. (When I realized that this was also true for a significant number of the faculty and almost all of the administration–people whose only cultural experience is within academia,–I started treating my time in college more honestly.) I think a better system would be one in which people actually do gain some experience before attending college. It would be much more efficient (working for free as an intern or apprentice seems preferable to paying several tens to hundreds of kilobux to maximize learning during free time).