As Richard Kennaway said, there are no essences of words. In addition to the points others have already made, I would add: Alice learns what the university tells her to. She follows a curriculum that someone else sets. Bob chooses his own curriculum. He himself decides what he wants to learn. In practice, that indicates a huge difference in their relative personalities, and it probably means that they end up learning different things.
While it’s certainly possible that Bob will choose a curriculum similar to a standard university course, most autodidacts end up picking a curriculum wildly different. Maybe the university’s standard chemistry course includes an introduction to medical drugs and biochemistry, and Bob already knows he doesn’t care about that so he can skip that part. Maybe the university’s standard course hardly mentions superconducting materials but Bob unilaterally decides to read everything about them and make that his main focus of study.
The education system also tells students which topics they should care about and think about. Designing a curriculum is a task all by itself, and if done well it can be exceptionally helpful. (As far as I can tell, most universities don’t do it well, but there are probably exceptions.)
A student who has never heard of, say, a Nash equilibrium isn’t spontaneously going to Google for it, but if it’s listed as a major topic in the game theory module of their economics course, then they will. And yes, it’s entirely plausible that, once students know what to google for, then they find that YouTube or Wikipedia are more helpful than their official lecture content. Telling people they need to Google for Nash equilibria is still a valuable function.