Every professional job, not just those in the medical profession, requires constant retooling and constant relearning of new information.  The major purpose of going to college is to learn how to learn beyond the spoon-fed approaches that characterize many (but certainly not all) K-12 experiences.  Many will agree that the correlation between one's choice of major in college and the work that he or she does later in life is low.  Just ask your co-workers: "How did you get to where you are professionally?"  The answers will reveal myriad circuitous paths.

One cannot "keep current" from "targeted courses and periodic updating, which can be learned online" unless one is highly motivated and self-directed.  That is one of the main things that one learns in college and makes the college experience so vastly different from that of high school.  In high school, students do focused assignments of short duration.  In college, they tackle problems of greater size with much less scaffolding and much wider horizons.  It is from wrestling with such problems and making mistakes that lead to solutions that one really learns, not only facts, but processes and ways to attack problems.

Yes, the cost of going to college is high, but from a personal perspective I can say without reservation that the greatest financial investment I ever made -- or that my parents made for me -- was in myself.  And I daresay that most of us would want to do the same for our own children to the best of our ability.  Every year at graduation our Chancellor acknowledges students who are the first in their families to graduate from college.  The pride of their parents, and the applause of the assembly, could not be greater.

Jesse Heines, Professor
UMass Lowell Dept. of Computer Science

I have been working for the past 30 years in the private.  In all my years I have rarely seen formal on the job training.  Your definiion of on the job training is following someone else.  This presents  and issue because you'll do it the same way the last person did it without offering improvements.

Colleges offer a lot more than skills.  They teach critical thinking.  Without that society as a whole will never advance

True, I have had very little use for many of the topics I learned in college and later in graduate school. But that's not the point. The real purpose of higher education, based on my experience was not what I learned, but that I learned I could teach myself. The real lesson was; "Here is where to find the resources, now go find the answers".