Comment by Aurornis

> I'm teaching faculty at a university and, at least where it comes to lecture courses, I don't find this a bubble. There are definitely plenty of students who would do just fine, if not even better, without the external discipline and structure.

I don't understand how you can make this claim based on observing students who are in an environment with discipline and structure.

I thoroughly believed this to be true when I was younger. I thought the explosion of the internet and availability of free course materials, videos, MOOCs, and any information you want was going to change the education game forever.

What finally changed my mind was when I became a hiring manager. I decided I'd give an interview to almost every self-taught developer who applied. If someone didn't have a college degree listed on their resume, I'd schedule a call to hear their story. I thought I was going to be uncovering diamonds in the rough that other companies overlooked.

With a few notable exceptions, it did not work out that way. Don't get me wrong: A couple of the self-taught developers were absolutely brilliant. However, I found that most were, to be blunt, not even progressing their intra-career knowledge as fast as peers with traditional backgrounds. We hired a few, but a common theme was that they needed more guidance for dealing with the structure and expectations of an office job.

I also had a few very above-average friends in high school who went the self-education route. "College is a waste of money" mindset. Voracious readers in their youth. Last I checked, both of them were bouncing from entry-level job to job.

Of course, there are students who go to paper-mill colleges who also learn very little.

I think the value of a demanding, structured college education is partially the education, but largely about learning how to learn. Learning how to deliver, learning how to operate on a schedule, and having some structure to check your understanding relative to peers. Almost everyone I know (including me!) who does self-studying reading thinks their understanding is better than it is right up until they have to apply it, at which point they realize they didn't understand it as deeply as they thought. It's easy to read course materials and think "That makes sense" because it's logically consistent, but integrating the knowledge in a way that you can apply it and reason about it is harder. Structured learning forces people to do the latter, whereas self-guided learning leaves it as an exercise for the reader. An exercise that many don't follow up on.