If your subjects were that easy, it sounds like you weren't challenging yourself enough. Quantitative degrees like math or physics weed out a lot of people who simply can't complete the material. For most soft subjects, I agree that it's only a matter of putting in time, but those honestly aren't difficult or interesting (as you've noted).
If I'm looking at resumes and I see a person with straight As in a hard major, I know that not only can they "complete a list of work", but that they're also probably smart. If I see a person who has straight As but majored in social sciences, I really can't conclude much about them.
Even quantitative degrees just require patience and perseverance - it might be intimidating to be surrounded by people much better at math/physics/cs than you, but if you put in the time and effort, getting a degree in one of these subjects is very doable. It's a matter of effort rather than being smart.
I definitely agree. On the other hand, I do think that someone who has walked through the fire and pounded their head against hard concepts for 4 years legitimately comes out smarter in some dimensions.
It's a sliding scale of one and the other. I was in the middle range of intelligence among the rest of the physics majors at my school, so had to work reasonably hard to get decent grades. Some of the brightest didn't have to work so hard. But in fact many of them did anyway, and were able to accomplish wonderful things because of that.
My major was computer science. It's still just a list of work. The math largely isn't as difficult as it is poorly explained and tedious. It's possible to obtain an intuitive understanding of most topics, and when you do, it's practically trivial to derive the underlying equations.
There are a great many areas of computer science that are incredibly difficult. There are a lot of long standing open problems that some of the smartest people on earth cannot solve. Further, a university gives you some of the best access to resources around: lots of domain expertise in various areas and access to nearly every worthy journal article in the world.
It astonishes me that you could come out with the attitude that everything is easy and college doesn't teach you anything useful.
Computer Science is not about learning to program C, or Java. If your college gave you that impression then it most certainly failed you.
Here you talk only about the most basic 101 level topics taught in CS:
When I went to school, I had about 10 years of programming experience already, but no java. That got me out of exactly zero classes, because the first two classes were effectively java syntax and apis. It also made the first two years of classes completely trivial, and was also unavoidable. At one point, I got accused of cheating because "it's impossible to learn C without attending lecture".
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I did not need to sit around and hear what if statements and looping constructs are, or watch TA's that don't really understand memory management try to explain it.
What about graph theory? Complexity theory? Machine learning algorithms? Cache-aware and cache-oblivious algorithms? Randomized algorithms? Numerical computing? Cryptography? Scientific computing (fitting data, doing simulated experiments)?
I certainly learned some of these topics in undergrad CS, although only at a basic level considering each domain is quite deep.
I did a year of computer science at what is supposedly the second best university in the world. While you do have access to journals, you don't really have time to use them; your time is filled with tedious exercises - exercises that often require only a basic understanding java syntax, yet, apparently, that were beyond half the students. After a year I switched into mathematics; either I'm less good at it or the problems are harder, but either way I was less bored, and the faculty seemed a lot more willing to talk about things beyond the immediate course. I wish there had been a route into theoretical CS - those big open problems - but I couldn't have stood another year of the undergrad course. If this is the best institution in my country, I dread to think what the subject's like elsewhere.
I agree that once you obtain an intuitive understanding of any topic, what once seemed incomprehensible is suddenly completely trivial. It's just getting to that stage that requires a lot of work. I studied computer science also and spent a ton of hours staring at equations. I figured it out eventually, and maybe I'm just slower than you, but it wasn't nearly as simple as you made it sound.
Getting back to the point: if you really weren't that challenged by your coursework, why didn't you seek more challenging material? I find it hard to believe that everything you could ever study in college would be so easy for you, or anyone for that matter. It's just a shame b/c you say how college is mostly worthless because you weren't really challenged, but it sounds like you could've gotten more out if it if you studied something that pushed your boundaries more.
There is also a lot of variability in CS programs. Mine was way heavy on math, and light on the computer side. EX: DifEq is useful, but IMO it's odd to require that of CS students while not requiring a functional language.
If I'm looking at resumes and I see a person with straight As in a hard major, I know that not only can they "complete a list of work", but that they're also probably smart. If I see a person who has straight As but majored in social sciences, I really can't conclude much about them.