You've got 2 different concepts about college mixed up in your post.
> because the competition all had college degrees, I beg to differ.
This is an issue about "credentials" & "signaling in the marketplace"[1], and not possession of actual knowledge.
>I recognize the huge gaps in my knowledge due to being self taught, [...] which I certainly have because I never followed a structured path on the subject.
And that's why I'm returning to get a degree now,
This is an issue about attaining knowledge. This is a separate issue from "credentials". All the topics of computer science that undergrad students study at Stanford and MIT are publicly available. Course syllabus, textbooks, and not to mention the vast resources of wikipedia, etc. If anyone wants to learn CS, he/she can study it. There's nothing magical about the 4 walls of a college campus that bestows special compsci knowledge. This is why hiring managers complain that many compsci graduates do not have actual programming skills.
I suspect the main thrust of your post is about the credential which is very defensible especially if you have aspirations for certain employers that absolutely require that piece of paper.
> All the topics of computer science that undergrad students study at Stanford and MIT are publicly available.
That's certainly true, and the same for mathematics or physics or philosophy or any other subject. But I've met very few people who have on their own actually done it, working through the material you'd cover in a 4-year degree (let alone going on to cover graduate-level work). Not zero people, just very few. I've met many more people who've worked through the equivalent of a few courses of material (e.g. have self-studied SICP), but that's a much lower bar.
Of those people I know who have done so, most are mathematicians. Could be random draw of who I know, but math does seem to draw autodidacts who go all-in and teach themselves the equivalent of a 4-to-6-year (or more) course of mathematics.
It's true that learning the contents of Knuth's Art of Computer Programming or Concrete Mathematics is easier in a class environment, but that's not the whole story. I'm a self taught software engineer. I actually find it fairly easy to compete against CS grads. A shocking number of them don't seem to pick up much CS during their 4 to 6 years in school. I've talked to countless grads who can't describe the differences between a process and a thread. They can't explain how they might implement even a naïve hashmap. I've had to spend an hour explaining to a colleague (a cs degree holder who was also the son of a cs professor) how amortized constant time append works in dynamic arrays.
For reasons I don't fully understand a cs degree does not imply cs knowledge. Grade inflation? Maybe they weren't given enough story problems?
When someone asks me about a concept I'm unfamiliar with, I don't have the excuse of that not being part of the curriculum.
First, there's a reason top-class students get better jobs. Not always, of course, but most of the times.
Second there are concepts that if you don't deal with them every day, you lose a your grip around them.
Third (and maybe most important), maybe CS was a good degree to have in terms of opportunities but wasn't their passion. You can't compete with passion. There are people who read this and that book only to acquire knowledge of a very specific domain out of pure passion about the topic at hand. You can't compete with those. These are the people who usually can make combine sources, spot errors, think outside the box for obvious reasons.
ps. I remember an instance when reading the Cryptonomicon, where Waterhouse - one of the main protagonists - was thinking that the fact he was at Princeton university in the 1930's was nothing special. He thought that in this place there was just a bunch of guys who knew one thing or two about maths and that was all there was to it. Later in the book while almost being drowned inside a German submarine, the only thing he could think of, was how to get his hands on a German strong box he came across. When he was healthy enough, he spent ~ 6 hours in a row trying to open the damn thing. When he did open the strong-box, he was almost depressed because he didn't really give a sht about what was inside. He wanted to know how thins German strong-box worked and if it can be reversed, somehow. Now that he knew that, there was nothing appealing about this strong-box. Not even the contents. To a pure mathematician like he really* was, there was nothing appealing in implementing something, once you understood how it works. Now, how on earth can you compete with a guy like that? :-)
> There's nothing magical about the 4 walls of a college campus that bestows special compsci knowledge.
There's a few things that make them good — most notably, the support available if you don't understand something well. While certainly there's a fair amount of support available (esp. online, and depending upon your corporate culture possibly at work as well), I'm yet to find a community that's as willing to help people understand material as many teaching staff are, especially when it comes to more obscure material.
It may just be the present college generation, but future generations will not hesitate or have issues getting into communal learning groups online to study similar topics without the need for a centralized instructor, especially when that instructor leaves them a hundred grand in debt.
Today, there is everything from IRC channels to mailing lists to forums to subreddits to facebook / g+ groups to linkedin groups to get involved with other students of the same topic, maybe even with a few veterans to provide guidance, to learn these subjects.
You won't find people that lecture you, but you will find people that will answer questions. I'm surprised there isn't an SO for that yet...
I propose both ideas are related. That requiring a degree as a signal in the marketplace is warranted because degree holders tend to actually possess knowledge.
> because the competition all had college degrees, I beg to differ.
This is an issue about "credentials" & "signaling in the marketplace"[1], and not possession of actual knowledge.
>I recognize the huge gaps in my knowledge due to being self taught, [...] which I certainly have because I never followed a structured path on the subject. And that's why I'm returning to get a degree now,
This is an issue about attaining knowledge. This is a separate issue from "credentials". All the topics of computer science that undergrad students study at Stanford and MIT are publicly available. Course syllabus, textbooks, and not to mention the vast resources of wikipedia, etc. If anyone wants to learn CS, he/she can study it. There's nothing magical about the 4 walls of a college campus that bestows special compsci knowledge. This is why hiring managers complain that many compsci graduates do not have actual programming skills.
I suspect the main thrust of your post is about the credential which is very defensible especially if you have aspirations for certain employers that absolutely require that piece of paper.
[1]http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2014/04/bryan_caplan_on.htm...