It's both. Starting to mature at that age, independence of living on your own, and applying yourself to some kind of real work, but without all of that being colored by unrelenting abuse by the financial treadmill. One could probably replicate that kind of slack outside the university environment, but you still need some kind of direction to be learning rather than merely hanging around and playing video games, so such an environment would be halfway to higher education regardless.
Work has provided me with plenty opportunity to learn, at a foundational level even. It's also a question of how you approach work. Sometimes it's as easy as asking for a little bit of extra time or loudly considering a little side project as promising the insight that's required for the next task.
Work has grounded me in such a way that in hindsight I regret staying around uni as long as I did instead of entering the workforce as early as possible. While I was less than a brilliant student, I wouldn't go as far as saying that uni was a waste for me. There are some things that I might never have learned otherwise. But I would love to know the other paths I could have taken in my profession.
Talking about tech we can actually put this in very concrete terms.
What shapes of technologies have you been paid to learn? Do they promote decentralized individual liberty like secure p2p communications? Or are they top-down-control corporate-empowering centralizing technologies like webapps and bitcoin?
I'd say there is a prominent skew for the types of things you can get paid to work on, because software that creates individual freedom intrinsically means creating distributed wealth that can't be easily collected to pay returns on investment. And if you don't even have a general understanding of the whole gamut of what is possible, you likely won't even know what you are missing.
