Nowadays people are realizing it's been a mistake to suck up to university structure and grant it so much prestige. A lot of college graduates today are, frankly, idiots. They are worse than uneducated: they are mis-educated, and have been conditioned to high levels of arrogance and low levels of self-awareness.

What I'm getting at is, people learn in different ways, and you say you aren't sure you can "hang at that level." Learn it your way, at your pace, pass the tests, and it doesn't necessarily matter where you can and can't hang. Plus, learning is valuable for its own sake.