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palladias comments on What are useful skills to learn at university? - Less Wrong Discussion
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When I was at college, I didn't just pick up universally useful skills, but also skills that would be a lot more costly to learn once I graduated. So, for me, that included:
It would be a lot more expensive to pay for some of these lessons now, to schlep to a studio, and/or to get the kind of structured instruction I got at school. So I got to pick up some useful, unusual skills and have gotten more of my programming from Udacity.
I don't use all of these skills that often, but you might value a skill for the different frames of reference it gives you as much as the actual applications of the skill. I like that now whenever I pick up a piece of glassware, I automatically think about how it was made and get a little jolt of joy.
Hmmm, I liked that idea a lot, until I thought about cost.
I'd think that most of those would be much more cost effective at the local community college after you graduate than at school while you're pursuing your degree. I can see the convenience factor of just going to another class, but at least from the US perspective, a university degree is extremely expensive, and the opportunity cost of not taking more career related classes too high.
Some schools charge tuition in proportion to the number of classes, have fixed timetables, or caps on the number of classes per semester, in which case taking more career related classes may not be an option.
Usually extracurriculars like these don't count towards any of those (aside from maybe a $10 registration fee or something).
Although it's possible to take a machine shop class at a community college after you graduate, it would take a significantly greater amount of time and reorganization of one's schedule (you are already living at or commuting to university, but this won't be true in four years). And the opportunity cost of not spending time on career or family might well prohibit it.
It's worth remember that in some countries university is much much cheaper.
A lot of careers don't have that many career-related classes.