I think I can bring another point of view to this discussion.

I'm currently 22, and have never been to college. I'm a smart kid, and have always had a passion for learning - but went through some rough times during and after high school that I'm just coming out of. I currently make most of my income from doing simple freelance coding work, and live with a group of people in something of a music / art commune.

I would love to go get a formal education, but I wouldn't want to attend a college where I was not being pushed to my fullest. I'm capable of learning on my own, and do so pretty much everyday, but feel that I could benefit greatly from being in an environment where other people are learning the same things, and where there was at least one person who had a lot more experience in whatever field was being studied than the class did.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of college courses that I've seen that deal with areas that I currently feel I could spend the rest of my life working with are rather poor. In the town I live in, I know at least one person with a BS in "comp-sci" who had never been exposed to the concept of a finite state machine, never been exposed to the concept of "first class functions", and had no practical experience with anything other than cut-and-paste java development, or similar cut-and-paste php development. I know that this is not the case at every college, but it seems to be becoming more of the norm than not.

I'm at a point where I can either continue doing hellishly boring freelance jobs until I make enough money to drop off the map for a while and develop something really useful to a lot of people, or I can go the route of putting myself in debt to go to college with the hopes that I can excel enough to either get noticed / hired by a company that is doing interesting work, or get a job that would allow me to pay off my debt, work for a year or two, and then again start working on software that would be useful to a lot of people.

Because of what I've seen of most colleges and their courses in most of the areas that I've been in, I tend to feel that I would be wasting a good four years of my life in most colleges.

I have some noticeable gaps in knowledge, specifically in maths, that I would like to fill (and am working on filling, thanks Knuth and friends for writing Concrete Mathematics - it's a wonderful start.)

Largely, the question for me is one of quality of education. I do not want to pay people to give me busy work for four years. I don't want to be paying for textbooks on core material that hasn't changed in decades and only differs from the previous versions by what order the chapters are in, or what order the questions are in.

What I want to do is learn to the best of my ability, and apply what I learn to the best of my ability. I think that a college environment very well could provide the means for that, but I have serious doubts that it is providing that for most students. Part of me doubts that most colleges even intend to provide that sort of environment.

I can see that degrees are starting to matter a lot less, at least in the programming industry. I for one hope that that trend continues, and we get a nice influx of employers who are looking to pay people to learn and apply their learnings to solving practical problems.

Anyhow, that's enough about that for now.