In hindsight the biggest benefit I got from university are friends and acquaintances.
All the knowledge is publicly available.
Do you think any meaningful alternatives to universities will pop up in the next 17 years?
(Assuming she's not pursuing a protected profession like doctor, lawyer, nurse, architect, ...)
University provides a sorting mechanism that allows others to quickly guess your skill level, competence, capabilities, and access to resources and understand where you likely fit into the societal hierarchy. Sure, it is not all that accurate, but it is the mechanism we have. Society is not going to stop using such indicators and providing different opportunities based on where others think you belong.
Granted, it is possible that university stops being that indicator, but I suspect things will shift from having a university degree to being mostly about where you got your degree from (which is already the case at the elite level, but less so at the lower levels).
For example, I attended a university where pretty much any fellow alumnus will take my call and alumni of similarly ranked universities consider me part of the in group from the start. For one of my internships, my boss was quite upfront that because I attended the same university he did, he assumed I was a good candidate from the start and all I had to do was not screw up the interview. I didn't have to impress. I went into the interview as presumably impressive.
That is a major benefit.
It frankly didn't matter what I actually did in university. It didn't matter what I learned. The most important factor for my career was that I went to a well regarded one that produces plenty of other powerful, rich, and influential people.
And to a top-5 business school for my MBA.
I agree that the brand of the latter is massively important in opening doors, and I believe these high end brands will remain valuable.
I'm mostly wondering whether the 5 years spent to obtain an engineering degree were useful, I can't imagine my daughter spending 5 years to obtain a degree when she turns 18.
The utility of school is that you are force to study subjects that you would never choose. Few people have the willpower to continue studying once the subject gets hard or boring. School in general, as we know it, will be a thing for the foreseeable future.
Just about all the information we study in college has been available in book form for at least a century yet you don't hear of most people learning as a solo student. The Internet has not changed that even though you can get the information in seconds.
I used to think that online school were a game-changer for those the could not afford college. In theory you could get a full college degree for a fraction of the university cost. I figured people would flock to it but that has not been the case. I'm sure some people have taken advantage of the situation but for the most part that's not the norm even in poor countries.
They define what output the school produces to meet THEIR needs. The students needs are secondary. If chat GPT or whatever meets their (mostly mindless) needs the incentive to fund schools reduces.
I try not overthink this one :)