Let me retort then.
No one is disputing that a Freshmen year in College is loaded with extraneous bullshit that they call requirements. There are also plenty of elective and non-elective courses that are pure fluff. Then again, people take a class on the classics because they want to or because it's part of an English degree or concentration.
But I believe what I said above pretty much holds true. Dollar for dollar, facilities at a college will blow the facilities of a community college out of the water. The people you're surrounded by are also pure students; they're not a guy trying to get his 2-year welding degree so he can move away from his shit hole of a life. Likewise, while there are plenty of faults with university professors, they're generally more knowledgable and better at teaching than a teacher at a CC who is there to ram through as many students as they can per semester. University professors can be like that too, but less often than CC teachers. The classes themselves are deeper (both a good and a bad thing), offer more variety and aren't truncated because of a limited budget like at CCs. Lastly, the opportunities that get put in front of you at a college is partly why you pay out the nose. Job faires at Universities are going to be better. Internship opportunities are going to be better. Scholarship opportunities are going to be better.
I mean, I get what you're saying. I loathed college and all the BS while I was there. But after I left I realized that most of my unhappiness was on me. Yes, you can't get around a lot of the reqs, but college is what you make of it by and large. I rarely took advantage of half of the things my university offered me because I was stubborn, lazy regarding anything beyond my course work and I wasn't pushing myself to excel, make connections or do something novel.
So if you're like ME, then yes, you're probably wasting a load of money on a university education. However, if you're NOT like me and want to pursue those scholarships, internships, research opportunities, ect..... a community college will not satisfy those ambitions. At least not to the degree a university could.
Lastly, it's worth noting: different universities do things differently. The ONLY pure general req course I had to take here was a library 101 course, to teach freshmen how to research academic journals online and use the dewey decimal system, and generally how to research a topic. Since I knew how to do that already, it was a big goddamn waste of my time. But for some people, that was necessary information to succeed in college. I never had to take a single lick of PE as a required course. So, again, not all universities are stupid to the same degree or in the same ways.