School means quite a few different things, obviously. What many people realize, myself included, is that the best thing about higher-education is that you will never again be tasked solely with learning full-time in-and-of itself again. After school, as such, when you learn something it is towards a very direct goal, to meet a specific end; but in college/grad school you get to explore the breadths and depths of any number of subjects simply for their own sake (although there will definitely be those things you study towards an end, it's rarely ever for the immediate future). You'll probably blow it, like the rest of us, having a good time and blowing off your studies, but you can party and hook-up for years to come, the learning's what's actually the good thing. High-school and below, on the other hand, is atrociously boring and you'll spend the majority of your time scraping the surface of various subjects and messing around. Oh, nod it's not at all bad that, if they'll take you, they pay you to go to grad school. :-)