In hindsight, the biggest benefit for me, from going to college was not the CS program. It was that the CS program actually had some really good hackers--still to date the friendliest and smartest lot of hackers I'd met outside a few particularly good Haskell meetups. So it's not mutually exclusive.
The second biggest benefit was that I was introduced to psychology as a science, and not some pseudo-intellectual horsing around as it was made out to be in high school. Ditto for economics. Taken together with the other cultural studies I dropped in on, it was something that's been fairly difficult to replicate now that I'm out of school. I'm actively trying to recreate at least some part of that experience now (using technology of course ;).
The clincher is that my alumni meetups have been nowhere near as enlightening as college was. I sometimes wonder if some people took boring pills during graduation, or if it really was the diversity that brought it out in people.
In all, college is what you make of it, just like real life.