Receipt of my College Diploma (title in progress)

In the advent of MIT's OpenCourseWare, Khan Academy, and Just Math Tutoring (just to name a few), I've been forced to re-evaluate the way I look at my current college experience.

I recently quit my job (and the cushy salary that it entailed). I decided that one more day doing something I hated just wasn't worth the money anymore. Even the prospect of being promoted sounded more like punishment than reward.

I love technology; I spend a good number of hours poring over tech articles on the internet, visiting science museums, and taking on projects like building electromagnetic motors and solar calculators. I'm turning my passion into action and I'm a born-again undergraduate student... and this isn't something I'm pursuing idly; I'm "that guy" in class. I sit in the front row, I record lectures, I raise my hand and ask questions when there's only 2 minutes of class left... If the school knew how much time I spent at the student center library, they'd probably start charging me rent.

Maybe it's because I don't go to a school renowned for engineering, or maybe undergraduate academia just isn't given the same level of attention as graduate/PhD programs are, but I've been discovering that most of my real education is coming from the internet.

I owe the vast majority of my calculus knowledge to PatrickJMT on youtube. My understanding of Electromagnetic theory would be limited to a few study guides that don't even MENTION Maxwell or his four equations if it weren't for Professor Lewin's 1992 lectures. I spent more time editing my chemistry lab reports to make sure the histograms matched the specifications than I did learning what the spectrophotometer was telling me about equilibrium between reactants.

So this raises the question: is the college degree I'm chasing little more than a receipt? Am I paying thousands of dollars just to have a few individuals make sure I keep my learning on schedule, and make sure the conclusions I come to meet their specifications?

I'm not arguing that school is a total waste; If I didn't have these task-makers at my back, I might be getting good at Halo instead of finding limits of integration, but I will gladly make the argument that an educated person isn't defined by the diploma he or she holds, but by the undocumented strides they take towards really understanding the courses they take.

Feel free to leave any thoughts; I'll get back to them when I'm done youtubing in the blanks my "formal" education left on motional electromagnetic force.