I understand that you might feel insulted at the thought that you're degree might have been all in vain, your experience at your school might have been special but as you've said it yourself, experience simply cannot be taught. School may hold lab sessions where you complete assignments "applying" which in some shape or form require you to recall facts transferred to you either through your faculty staff or books, and are told to understand, but with constraints set in place to evaluate you on a quantitative model among with the rest of your peers so that they may decide who is the top 10% vs the 90%.

The real world does not work like this, and often I find that academia prepares you for a world that doesn't behave or exist like the ones described through courses and lectures which are only aimed at grading and evaluating on some set of criteria. It's not necessarily an accurate meter of how you will adapt your knowledge and skills in the real world, I belive Nassim Taleb mentions the concept of 'empty suits', or so called experts who focus entirely on a constructed model of the world they are absolutely convinced will not change with lack of accounting for black swan events (an event that is unexpected and debunks a widely accepted belief, for example swans were thought to be white until the discover of black swans in Oceania) and basically the society attributes an irrational amount of trust and credit in those that have gone to the best of the schools in the best of what they do, not necessarily based on the inevitable nature of change (earth was flat, now it's round) upon random discovery that challenges what we've accepted as "facts".

It's a question of realizing you are being taught how to think and what to think by the institution that measures efficiency on a normal curve, instead of discovering the process and the target yourself.

Now of course, university life is much bigger than just lectures and learning, you meet so many interesting people, you learn that there are more questions than answers, and I think that is the best part. Maybe if you've gone to an Ivy League, you will find yourself surrounded with individuals of influential and powerful families which you can expand your social circle for future business and collaboration and that is all the more reason to go to one, but then I question the ability of someone with middle or lower class status to be genuinely accepted amongst those that have it all already.