This is a good point, though for most people, valuable skills are often "dry" and undesirable like plumbing, so someone who was really passionate might've persevered on his own anyways. Even if academia has the merit of making you persevere through a class you wouldn't have on your own, it's not efficient; Most of the classes colleges require from you to just graduate aren't "you-will-actually-need-this-later-in-life" classes and are just filler classes.
Front-loading on dry subjects also has the downside of scaring away people who would've otherwise done well given a different path of learning.
The timing of when you learn some things is also important; it matters not if you learned software architecture in college only to have all the knowledge become obsolete by the time you really need that skill - you'd have to review or worse relearn it by yourself all over again.
> Most of the classes colleges require from you to just graduate aren't "you-will-actually-need-this-later-in-life" classes and are just filler classes.
There's no way to know in advance which of those classes you won't need, though. Programming has become very specialized; it's no longer possible for a University to provide an education sufficient to prepare a student for the work they'll be doing in the "real world" because there's so much variability from one job to the next. Having a broad education, though, puts a person in a situation where they can more readily adapt to a wide variety of roles than they would without that background knowledge.
Front-loading on dry subjects also has the downside of scaring away people who would've otherwise done well given a different path of learning.
The timing of when you learn some things is also important; it matters not if you learned software architecture in college only to have all the knowledge become obsolete by the time you really need that skill - you'd have to review or worse relearn it by yourself all over again.