In my view treating college as largely a game or whose metric is sheer survival, is wasting money, or more likely, paying to support the students who are getting something else out of it. This is not necessarily a personal judgment, because there may be people who are predisposed to see everything as a game, but who deserve to get the best education possible anyway.

Here's my stupid parable. Give two people shovels and send them into a mine. One of them comes back with a bag of gold. The other comes back with an intense hangover. What's broken, the shovel or the mine?

Colleges, despite the image of paternalism, are actually designed to let you fail. People will leak clues on how to survive, but are less likely to tell you explicitly how to succeed. But everybody has the same chance of getting a degree in something. As a result, the people who benefit from the signaling and branding of the college outnumber the people who got a good education out of it, creating the impression that college is largely about signaling and branding. But college is really about deciding what you want to get out of it.

There are doubtlessly many things wrong with college education today, but in spite of that, taking college at face value and pursuing it in a relatively straightforward way may still be a better strategy than trying to figure out what game to play in order to survive.