abandonment issues

hello, blog.
i'm sorry for abandoning you. i've been working on rather serious things that aren't suited for your format.
however, i have missed you. i miss casual writing. i miss the short form. i miss the thinking-out-loud feeling i get when i click "new post" without any ideas to direct what i'll write.
so i'm back.
i've had much to think about over the last few days.
i'm putting things in order to return to my education, which is something i'm pretty conflicted about. i'm going to try to work it out here, because it's something i'm going back and forth on. i can't seem to make up my mind about whether going back to school is worth it. national student debt is now over 3 trillion dollars, and since my parents have (fairly and correctly) determined that i'm old enough to take some financial responsibility, going back to school means consciously joining the millions of americans with insurmountable debt. columbia runs about 55 grand a year, plus rent on whatever apartment i find, plus subway fare, plus books, plus plus plus plus...
it's an awful lot of money that i don't have, and wont have for the foreseeable future. what will it buy? a degree from an ivy league college, which translates to an interview at any job or post-graduate school, the beginning of a career.
but i don't want a career.
that degree also represents two more years of studying under some of the greatest minds in the world, which isn't something i'm inclined to turn down. i like to learn. i like to do new things, find out things i don't know, read things i wouldn't read. i could do that at columbia. i could re-engage in academia.
but what is learning separated from practice? from experience?
what IS the real value of an environment organized the way a college is organized? where a student thinks about books all day, reads books, argues about books, writes about books, and every few months is forced to prove her knowledge of books? what kind of reality is that?
i can't make up my mind.
sometimes i'm excited about the opportunity to sit in a room with really smart people and listen to them talk, but then i realize that college isn't really about learning for the fun of learning (or reading for the fun of reading, writing for the fun of writing, etc). it's about career-training, which is why the whole institution has become so antiquated. the aim of a college like columbia is to groom its students, to mold them into representatives of itself. i don't want to represent anyone that isn't me. i don't want to be groomed or molded.moreover, i'm not interested in jockeying for professor approval or competing for participation points. i never have been, which is one of the reasons my gpa is now abysmal.
blegh. it seems that there are better ways to spend my time than accumulating degrees. though maybe getting one of them wouldn't be all bad.
is it worth it?
what else can i do?