College Admissions as a Brutal One-Shot Game

What circles are those?

For me the answer is yes, but my situation is quite non-central. I got into MIT since I was a kid from a small rural town with really good grades, really good test scores, and was on a bunch of sports teams. Because I was from a small rural town and was pretty smart, none of this required special effort other than being on sports teams (note: being on the teams required no special skill as everyone who tried out made the team given small class size). The above was enough to get me an admission probably for reasons of diversity I'm a white man but I'm fairly certain I got a bonus to my application for being from a small rural town.

Counterfactuals are hard, but going to MIT probably helped me to get into a prestigious medical school, leading to my current position as a doctor at a prestigious hospital. People at least pretend to be impressed when somewhat tells them that I went to MIT, despite my undergraduate field of study having absolutely nothing to do with my current job. Since I was lucky enough to be able to attend the university by doing the things I would have done anyway, I'd certainly say the effort was worth it.

No. I would wake up early to do homework, spend 8 to 10 hours at school (and often do homework during class), and then go home and do more homework. Looking back I got a lot more value out of my non-school activities and hobbies than I did out of doing homework, but there was just so little time for anything else. I was constantly stressed about missing deadlines and usually extremely tired. Meanwhile when my husband was in high school he did zero homework and actually did things in the world like building a house and starting a startup, which seems way better to me.

And then my top university was a miserable place where I learned nothing and didn't even make any useful connections, and just suffered for four years while my parents paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for it, and THEN it turned out that ~all of the jobs I've ever had, including my first job out of college, I got based on performing well on work tests, which I could absolutely still have done if I'd gone to some small liberal arts school. No one has even asked to see my resumé since 2019 and all of my work has been completely unrelated to my degree.

tl;dr school is a scam don't fucking go don't do it stay the fuck away

I think so, yes? I found one of my great collaborators in life there, and I don't think I would have found a collaborator of a similar calibre at other universities. It was also a place with opportunity for me to build a great conference as a side-project, which depended on the prestige of the place and the fact that a few key orgs were based around that uni. (I went to Oxford Uni; FHI and CEA were there.)

I am not a hard worker in general, and didn't work that hard to get there, having a certain level of base IQ was pretty key for me.

Obviously everything the university had me do (or 'taught me') was a waste of time, but it was a schelling coordination place for smart and talented and prestige-seeking people. 

Added: Not going to uni would also have been a very poor choice for me, I really damn care about immigration access to the US, and a technical degree is basically critical for me to have that.

Not exactly your question, but I did poorly in a state university, and dropped out after two years.  I figure it cost me a decade of support and ancillary jobs before I fully self-educated in CS fundamentals and started my career as a professional software developer.  

I've since been quite involved in hiring for large tech companies, and it's clear that a degree from a top-20 school is far better than from a random one, which is better than no degree, in terms of likelihood of being taken seriously as a junior applicant.  It takes 5-10 years of employment before it becomes irrelevant.

Questions of "worth the effort" are very hard to answer, because it's impossible to know the counterfactuals.  On a purely financial and comfort level, it'd have been worth the effort for me to have done better in school, and actually graduated, preferably from a better school.  But that's mostly because it's easy to discount the cost to past-me of doing so.  In fact, I didn't and maybe couldn't.

I'm not sure whether this counts: I went to the University of Cambridge, which is (especially for mathematics, which is what I studied there) probably the best university in the UK, with a worldwide reputation, but unlike top US universities it doesn't charge enormous fees. And I didn't put any particular effort into having a vast range of impressive extracurricular activities, I was just very good at mathematics. So the costs for me were very different from those for someone attending, say, Harvard. (Also, this was 30+ years ago, when even Harvard was much cheaper than now.)

Anyway: yes, definitely worth it for me. I went there to learn a lot of mathematics, and that's what I did; some of the people who taught me were world-class mathematicians (though it will probably surprise no one to learn that being a world-class mathematician does not imply being a world-class teacher of mathematics); a lot of the people around me were super-smart or super-interesting or both. (Also, and not to be neglected, I made some good friends there and did a bunch of other enjoyable things, but that would probably have been much the same at any other university.) And, though it wasn't particularly why I chose to go there, I'm pretty sure it was good for my career -- though for obvious reasons it's hard to disentangle.

Yes. Some of that was luck, but I think the number of things you'd have to change before my limited strategy ability was better applied outside college than in was very high. But I do wish that long list of things had been different.

Or get a postgrauate degree.