I don't think going to college is worth it if you're just going to get a degree. If the education will get you a foundation that will almost certainly benefit you, go for it. For example, if you want to be a doctor you have to finish college before you get go to medical school, but I'm not sure a C.S. degree makes you a better sys admin.

Let's pretend you start your own startup and you look for an entry level dev + ops kind of person. All other things being equal, would you rather hire a CS grad with no work experience or the person who didn't go to college with 1 year of startup experience working as a dev and being a sys admin? Either way, you should probably hire the person who demonstrates the best ability to do the job.

There is definitely some value in having a college degree. HR drones may opt to interview college grads first. You'll certainly learn things in college you may not learn other places. But college is pretty damn expensive these days, you've already got a career that pays you something, and it's hard for me to imagine you could learn something in college that you couldn't just teach yourself by building interesting things on your own.

Basically if you have to ask if college makes sense, spending a lot of money to go to college to find out if college makes sense may be doing things the hard way.

Here's a post from my old blog questioning whether or not it was a good investment to have gone to grad school -- http://captainrecruiter.blogspot.com/2011/05/value-propositi....