Having taught at the elementary, middle, and high school levels, and then moving to teaching university students, I noticed a lot of improvements in the abilities of the student population. But there are a few things that gradually got WORSE as my students got older:
1) Students tend to DRASTICALLY underestimate what they "need" to know, and so they underestimate what they need to learn.
There are a lot of skills that you pick up while learning a subject that can be applied to other areas of your life, whether or not the specific CONTENT of the class can. The beauty of the process is that the best way to LEARN those skills is in that sideways manner--to pick them up incidentally while working on something else--and something you DON'T favor. This way, you're learning by doing.
In classes where you're thrilled to be learning, especially early in college, you'll likely be ahead of the curve. You like this enough to major in it, so you've probably done some independent study on at least the basics. What that means is some of those "intellectual coping skills" (as I call them personally) aren't necessary--without realizing it, you can skate by without 'em. Then, when you really need them, they're not quite there.
2) Students tend to DRASTICALLY underestimate what they HAVE LEARNED from people or classes they may not have liked.
You see it a million times a second on the internet. "I didn't learn anything in high school, it was so stupid, all of my teachers were stupid, and I learned everything on my own." You're listening to someone who is probably a pretty good learner... but more than a bit of a dick. See, when you're GOOD at learning, the process is very natural to you--so much that you don't always REALIZE that it's happening.
Some of the best teachers out there don't form that buddy-buddy bond with their students. What they teach isn't how to "love" the subject, it's how to do it well. We desperately need BOTH kinds of teachers, and if we don't have both, we get unbalanced people. These teachers are focused on generating high expectations for the student, transferring responsibility to the student, and then monitoring the process while providing the "puzzle pieces" the students will be expected to assemble. You learn a lot more from these teachers and these sorts of classes than you think (again, even going BEYOND the specific content label of the class)... but since you don't "like" them, you're probably not going to give them any credit for it.
3) Students tend to drastically OVERestimate the power of "content knowledge" in their respective fields.
These are the students that think, "I'm going to be a doctor, so I shouldn't be studying anything but medical stuff." And this leads them to think, "Because I've studied so much medical stuff, I'll get the better jobs." I've done a lot of interviews, and none of them have ever had a quiz or a test. Never have I sat there with two other applicants, each of us holding a buzzer, and had to buzz in first to get the job.
Yes, you need to know your stuff. But you'll also have resources available to you on the job to look up facts and figures that may have slipped. Even if you're sure, you'll sometimes want to double-check them anyway. There comes a "saturation point" at which the knowledge of the top bunch of candidates for a job is pretty much dead-even. And frankly, it's not impressive for a doctor to "know his stuff," is it? It's ASSUMED, if he's got the stethoscope, he'd BETTER know his stuff.
The selection process goes way beyond this. Who can speak and communicate well? Who has broader interests and experience, meaning they have a deeper well from which to draw? Who can think quickly, react under pressure, and do what needs done even when it's not fun? These are all things you get better at by studying more things.
Intelligence isn't a measure of how much you know. It's a measure of how quickly and flexibly you can navigate the things that you know, connecting old and new knowledge, finding similarities and differences. The more connections you make, the more intellectual pathways you'll have to choose from when the usual path isn't getting you there. Think of it like the interstate system in the US--if there was just ONE big interstate going from east to west, and ANYTHING bad happened on that, you'd be screwed. The more roads we have, the quicker we can get exactly where we want to go, even when there are traffic jams.
The moral here: Take your classes. Get what you can out of them. If you feel the money is "wasted," you're the one wasting it. There's value in it, whether or not you'll ever notice or appreciate it.
