Is college actually good at that sort of thing, or is it just better than staying at home? If I spent half my college tuition on networking, social clubs, conferences, hobby groups, etc, I bet I could do a lot better than I did at my college campus.
In theory, you could take your college costs and spend them more wisely elsewhere. Internet age gurus like Peter Thiel, Seth Godin & others have been advocating this for 20 years.
Want to learn business? Take $50k out of the $200k price tag of a fancy college and start a business with a few similarly minded people. Pay a seasoned business person to advise you. After 4 years, you will know much more about business. Same for software engineering, etc. Same for side-effects like networking horizon expansion and everything.
In practice, all that money (whether parental savings to student loans) is tied up with college. The social capital which allows anyone to spend 4 years on abstract "betterment" is tied to college. The safety nets keeping you on course to graduate aren't there.
It's theoretically possible, easy even. In practice, this level of determined heterodoxy is a 1-in-a-thousand thing. Very unlikely to be chosen and very unlikely to bee seen through by a 20-year old.
People operate within structure. We are orders of magnitude less independent than we imagine.
(Also I think the parent meant that the 20-year-old would take $50k from their parents, not $200k. But agree that $50k is likely out of reach for most people in that situation as well.)
Life works this way because life works this way. Social structures exist to reinforce the status quo, and these are only changed incrementally, over a long period of time. Potential college-goers who want to jump the queue and do something radical right now, even if it's a much better thing, are going to have a hard time unless they have well-off parents who are willing to take a shot on them.
If you think about yourself at 18... how likely would you have been to seek out social clubs, conferences, or hobby groups on your own?
I think that would be a great strategy! Spending the money on hobby groups, conferences etc could be put on a resume!
Now thinking of all kinds of options that would give better experience...it seems driving to these might be the bottleneck. But surely there are ones that can subject a student to different opinion/people etc without needing to commute. Heck even a good internship could replace dorm life, and would actually PAY the student.