One of the biggest lessons of my Ivy-league education was, paradoxically, that it wasn't sufficient (or even necessary). At least not for the goals I wanted.
If you want access to the elite Wall St. or consulting jobs, then yes, you need it. Once you're in, it's almost impossible to be kicked out. Finish, interview, and you're on the path.
But I had longstanding doubts about the state of my actual education. Despite numerous engineering classes, I couldn't, for example, work out i^i in my head instantly.
Imagine someone asked you "Roughly, what do you think 2^512 to be?"
"I don't know exactly, but it's an enormous positive number, probably more than the atoms in the universe."
Ok. You should spit that out instantly. Now imagine someone asks "Roughly, what do you think i^i is?"
Is it positive? Negative? Real? Imaginary? Close to 1.0? Microscopic? Even if you eventually work it out after a minute, does your long delay mean you understood exponents or imaginary numbers? Is this something that should be solidified before, say, studying the Fourier Transform?
Despite scoring well in classes taught by famous professors, I couldn't answer such basic questions. This was literally middle school operations (exponents) used with high-school parameters (imaginary numbers). I was stuck -- and it didn't seem like anyone thought this a reasonable thing to understand.
It led me on a journey of self-education, but I needed to see firsthand that even in an Ivy-league environment, the basics could still be missed. It ended the fantasy that things were transformatively different in some other place -- it was up to me to fill the gaps.
ps. If you want to work out i^i in your head: https://betterexplained.com/articles/intuitive-understanding...