"Is it worth it to have, in my early- to mid-thirties, what will likely be 3-4 completely unproductive years?"
Education (and by that I mean the official, credential-providing type of education) is an investment. Yes, some less productive years are a given. But if you do it right, your earning potential will be higher, you'll be able to work on more interesting and challenging problems, and you'll give yourself more career options. There are certain problem domains that it'd be very difficult to break into without a guide to get you started in the right direction.
With that said, it really depends on what you want to do for the rest of your life. If you don't have any specific career goals, either find some or drop out, because it's a bad investment and you'll waste time and money. If you want to make simple web apps for a living and you're sure that's all you'll ever want to do, drop out, because you can learn that easily on your own. College is definitely not worthless - you just need to figure out what it's worth to you.
My advice: look around for professors solving problems you find interesting, and make contact with them and see if they'd be willing to work with you. Try to find work that really stimulates you, and do that.
Yeah, I definitely do not want to be working on web apps in 3 years. That being said, I do have an interesting job doing interesting work that is both challenging and rewarding, and is NOT in the website business. They seem not to care too much about whether or not I have a degree; the CTO was more impressed by my github repos & other public-facing aspects of my "hacking life." But good thoughts, thank you.
edit: I'd eventually love to be working on problems e.g. NLP & ML but those are master's and phd-level fields afaik, and I definitely am not interested in chasing that at this point in my life.
Education (and by that I mean the official, credential-providing type of education) is an investment. Yes, some less productive years are a given. But if you do it right, your earning potential will be higher, you'll be able to work on more interesting and challenging problems, and you'll give yourself more career options. There are certain problem domains that it'd be very difficult to break into without a guide to get you started in the right direction.
With that said, it really depends on what you want to do for the rest of your life. If you don't have any specific career goals, either find some or drop out, because it's a bad investment and you'll waste time and money. If you want to make simple web apps for a living and you're sure that's all you'll ever want to do, drop out, because you can learn that easily on your own. College is definitely not worthless - you just need to figure out what it's worth to you.
My advice: look around for professors solving problems you find interesting, and make contact with them and see if they'd be willing to work with you. Try to find work that really stimulates you, and do that.