My takeaway from my bachelor's was that my time in school wasn't so much about what I learned there (though it did teach me things I wouldn't have even thought of on my own), but a) learning how to learn on my own, and b) getting a piece of paper proving that I can stick with a difficult and expensive program long enough to get through it.

Though as I understand it, at the associate's level, classes are more about learning specific skills than the theory behind them. Like an associates level CS course might teach a specific language or framework while a bachelor's level CS course will focus on algorithms, data structures, how a genetic framework might be designed and built, etc.

To get an associates your course load was probably disproportionally gen ed requirements so... No kidding.