Dean Esmay writes about the worthlessness of college. He's making a few mistakes, though:
First, it's gotten this way because the people who take courses are not the people who pay for them (by and large). Whether it's peoples parents, taxpayers, or people in their own futures, college students are virtually never spending money that they have already earned. This has a tremendous negative effect on what they're willing to do; by and large they want to get through with as little pain and as much fun as possible. This is very normal and very human; when they're not making great sacrifices for it, they're not much inclined to seek great benefit from it. The old maxim of "Easy come, easy go" still holds; people value what they sacrifice for.
Since college courses are actually held (in general) in a fairly free-market environment, courses have to cater to their students. Most students don't want difficult courses. The result should not be surprising.
Next, and far more important, people aren't learning because there's too much information taught to them. In essence, no one learns at college because they're taught too much.
This information overload starts from when we are very young. From the age of five or so, normal human beings in our culture get bombarded with information. It never stops, but during school it just gets worse. As elementary school turns into middle school, and middle school to high school, and high school to college, the information just keeps coming faster and faster. The result is that people get very good at temporarily learning information without remembering it or understanding it. Eventually it becomes so natural to them that they learn without learning without even thinking about it; it's like tuning out noise.
Students eventually get to the point where they can take and pass courses without actually learning anything in the real sense of the word, yet they can absorb information and retain it for a few months before completely forgetting it. It's actually a rather impressive skill, if you think about it abstractly.
Do students learn anything in college? Most of them don't, really. Certainly nothing academic when considered in relation to how much they were taught. But is this the fault of the teachers? Only somewhat, and not in the way it's typically thought. Modern college professors are in the interesting circumstance that if they taught half as much, their students would probably learn twice as much. Except...
Except that it doesn't work that way either. College students don't want to learn; if you reduce the amount you teach them, they don't increase the amount of time that they spend on it, they just take more credits and try to either get more or get college over faster. Or they go out drinking more (or whatever) more.
And if you were to restrict what you teach to requiring no outside work and only being on what is taught in class, people will just sleep through it or not show up.
Oddly, part of why college must be so superficial is because no one wants it.
Until you get to your specialized senior level classes with 4 or 5 people who all actually want to be there; then people are engaged and work together to slow the professor down to a reasonable pace, and they help each other, and they actually want to be there so the professor does too.
The downfall of college has been its popularization; like so many things when anyone can get in, it's not worth getting in any more. Popularity is often a curse, though typically only when something is popular for the wrong reasons. College by its very nature couldn't scale because its magical effects were due primarily to small size and even more to self-selection on its participants. For most people, there's no reason to go to college related to actually being at college, and most of them acknowledge it. They need a degree in order to get a job, past that, they want it on the least painful terms available. Why do people wonder at the result?
Finally, the dark secret of all academia is that all learning in life is self-taught learning; people can give you information, but unless you can teach it to yourself, it won't do you any good. This is the case for everything from spoken language (it's why babies repeat all sorts of nonsense syllables) to how to swing an ax without chopping your foot off to what the hell symbolic integration is. All language — all symbols verbal or not — are an attempt to get someone else to produce a sequence of mental events in their own head. Your ability to make this happen stops at their eyes and ears — the rest is up to them. That goes as much for connecting the parts of an argument into a coherent arguments as it does for connecting the phonemes in "class dismissed" into two separate words that indicate that it's time to get up and walk out of the room.