In both history and political science you are not writing your opinion. You are creating a fact based argument, something which is very different from an opinion and needs to show a full grasp of the arguments others have made in the readings. If you approach it from the angle of writing your opinion you are going to end up with a badly written assignment. I'm sorry that this was not made clear to you, but it's an important distinction.

I strongly disagree that college is a waste, but will agree that there are other options and that it shouldn't serve as the roadblock to employment that it currently does. However, for the careers you outlined both teaching and engineering are going to require a base knowledge that is best learned in the classroom before real world experience makes the needed impact. If you've ever worked with an engineer you would know that they don't have the time to cover 101 topics with every new hire because they never learned it in school.

There are many issues with universities and colleges that need to be addressed and our path from school to work needs to be cleaned up. There is so much space here for compromise. But unfortunately the arguments around what happens at institutes of higher education are too often made from a position of ignorance or bad faith which prevents us from even being able to start discussing how we could re-imagine it's relationship to society & work. People need to put in the minimal effort needed to understand how and why colleges are an invaluable resource before they can start to dismantle why they're also kinda fucked up. Like the papers you wrote in college and did poorly on, it should start with understanding the position you are against.