As a college student, I'm always torn about whether or not it is worth it to get my CS degree. Sometimes, my classes seem really useless, but at other times, I feel like I'm learning a lot socially at college.
How expensive is college if we take away tuition? Is a college really more than just an employment agency for professors, an agency that provides its own classrooms and spaces?
(Btw, if you are being sarcastic and referring ironically to the last line of the counterpoint, my apologies for misreading you.)
I would be interested to know whether there are any cohort studies on dropout success. I know overall dropouts tend to make much less money and perform much worse on many other metrics. However, that may simply be because the weak drop out.
But overall, I guess it is an unsafe bet. If you can't seem to pursue your passion with a few hours of classwork a day in your way, you're going to have a hell of a time doing it while also working ten hour shifts as a waiter because you couldn't get a more lucrative, easier job thanks to your lack of higher education.
College is easy. If you can't pursue your passions while also doing college, you're gonna have a problem either way.
That's probably why the statistics favour the students.
I went through gen-ed classes that I literally never attended. I sometimes read the books and got A+s in the courses. I went through a high-level technical communications class that was to re-teach basic English mechanics that a proficient high school student ought to be able to master. I was retaught the primitive basics of C, Java, and C++; nothing that couldn't be learned through a few online tutorials and nothing advanced enough to prepare someone for an embedded job without prior internship experiences.
On the other hand, I got instruction on advanced algorithms and had two year long projects where we worked for actual clients (Microsoft, others) for actual money with deliverables and accountability. But that wasn't worth the $200K it would have cost if I didn't have scholarships.
I'm really not sure what that has to do with it; proportionally, I know more people that didn't go to college that got individual contributor programming or sysadmin jobs than who started companies. The things that school gets you can be as important (and sometimes more important) in a management/owner role than in an individual contributor role.
I know for me, it wasn't hard to get myself up to the minimum technical level for a Programmer/SysAdmin gig... but my social skills are, well, lacking. I don't know that you learn those in college, but I always thought that college was an important part of the social development of the 'middle-class adult' that I was missing.