Out of curiosity, what sorts of skills/etc would you want to see for students to succeed in college, that they don't have now?
* Self discipline
* Study skills/how to study
* Motivation for learning, not just getting credentials.
For all of theses reasons, I learn way more on my own than I do in my classes. Many of my peers do the same.
The class is important for giving you an organization of the material that helps to solidify your foundation for future learning, and also to hold you accountable for the pace. This doesn't work for everybody, admittedly; but often it is an intellectual maturity thing, and by making ourselves go through it we are much better off in our fourth year than our first.
The keeping of pace and lectures are not intentionally there to add difficulty or responsibility, they are there for vestiges of an era from when the lecture and class model was invented, before we even had the printing press. They exist now mainly for logistical convenience and because people think they can find reasons for why we should keep them around and why they are the best pedagogical transmission method for most students. They are not. They really suck. It has long since been determined that most people can only even hold their attention on something for ~15-20min (hence the length of TED talks).
If the material was organized in a cohesive series of books, then you could just read those, and classes would mainly be for projects. There is a reason Sal Khan and Elon Musk both skipped nearly all of their lectures in college and both advocate for education to be massively overhauled.
You should be able to just study on your own and periodically show up for proctored exams, and take them as many times as you need to in order to reach true understanding. And you should be able to take such exams without having to pay for lectures.
Most people would be completely lost studying on their own. They exist, however. But if most people could do it they would. And you are correct also about lectures lasting longer than most peoples' attention span. But they stem from a time when college wasn't for most people.