Look at the labor market itself. Someone with a four-year degree still earns roughly a million more over a lifetime than someone without one, even after accounting for tuition and lost wages. Unemployment rates for degree holders are consistently about half of what non-graduates face. From a game theory perspective, it is a cooperative move in a fundamentally competitive system. If everyone skips college, employers just use other signals and grads still get filtered in. But as long as the credential exists, opting out leaves you with worse information, fewer options, and a weaker bargaining position. The math only works against you if you ignore the world as it actually operates.

Is the cost of college really about downloading information, or about the signal it sends to employers? If AI and YouTube truly made degrees worthless, we would see employers ignoring them. Instead, companies still use the degree as a screening filter because it signals persistence, cognitive ability, and follow-through. In game theory terms, we are all stuck in a coordination game: no individual wins by unilaterally dropping the credential while the market demands it. Self-teaching works for motivated people, but most of us need structured incentives to build skills others can verify. College is a costly signal—but in this labor market, the cost of not sending it is higher.

The practical consequence is simple: when you apply for a job, the screening software doesn't ask if you watched great videos or trained a personal AI. It asks if you have the degree. That filter decides who gets the interview, and skipping it puts you at a permanent strategic disadvantage. You're right that AI can teach skills for free. But a self-taught coder has no verified signal of persistence or ability. In game theory, that's an information asymmetry problem. Employers can't trust the signal, so they default to the credential. Until that changes, the rational move is to pay for the degree, because the cost of not having it is higher.