For a lot of people in the world, school goes on until they can stand it no longer. For a lot of people, even a high school diploma takes a lot of work and is a major accomplishment to acquire. For folks like that, it most likely seems as if getting a degree would be somewhere between a waste of time like counting the grains of sand on a beach, and torture like having their teeth slowly worn away to dust by a die grinder. But of course, there are a lot of things about school that simply are not necessary when you go to college, such as a highly rigid schedule and the silly rules that are designed for the dumbest children who have not yet emotionally developed enough for it.
College is not like high school. For one thing, most high schools are all about training the students to go into menial jobs. After all, if a student stops at that stage of the game, that is about how far their options lie. Without further training of some kind, most of the jobs that are going to be available will consist of low paying service positions. As such, the factory mindset pervades high school, and dominates its schedule and structure. But college is a whole lot more free, time wise.
In a college environment, you are not constantly going from one class to another. Whether you choose to go to a physical campus or to attend your classes on the Internet, you are always going to have options as far as when to take the classes that you want and need to take. The entire structure is based around being able to be a professional person or even self employed, where you can do what you want and need to with a lot of freedom. While freedom always carries plenty of responsibility with it, the trade off is a difficult but nice one.