But the thing is, the issue of college in the US is very different from the issue of college (or equivalent) in other places, and notably France. One significant difference being that Ecole Polytechnique and most high-profile French engineering school are free or almost so (automatically for French students, it's a bit more varied for international ones). Consequence is, most of the points revolving around "should I go to college and put myself in a huge debt" don't apply to us. In France, you should study at least until master level, given the opportunity, because it gives a very big edge afterwards.
Corollary: nobody (or almost nobody) would hire someone without a degree here. Emphasis on diplomas seems even higher than in the US.
I'm not saying one is better than the other (we have our own issues), but the situations really aren't comparable.
I've found that in (music/audio) signal processing software, the backgrounds of the programmers are almost more erratic than in more general software like mobile and web apps. Many were drop outs and people with degrees in seemingly unrelated subjects, like music or biology. That said, one constant I noticed was that a high percentage of them were from Europe.
Other students went to the same school I'm sure. Why are we not seing the same results from all of them or at least from the majority of them? The question whether you should get university education is not an easy one. I'm strugling with it all the time and I am going to an university.
The point isn't that Fabrice Bellard isn't special. It's that even a special (clearly brilliant and self-directed) guy like him can arguably benefit from the systematic learning of domain specific information that happens at a university.
It could be the case that had Bellard not gone to university, he would have gone to the library and learned all those things on his own, and still built all the things he did. Or, it could be the case that the university exposed him to a ton of readily digestible theoretical knowledge that he wouldn't necessarily have stumbled upon on his own.
He's a counter point to guys like Zuck. You don't really need any theoretical knowledge to build something like Facebook. You need a lot of theoretical knowledge to build something like FFMpeg. A university education not only provides a way to learn the necessary theory, but exposes you to a lot of domains of theory which can inspire you to solve problems you might not have thought to tackle, because you find out that there are theoretical tools to help you tackle those problems.
You still have to work to benefit from a university. They don't inject knowledge directly into your brain. You have to consciously put in hard effort to learn the material and retain it, instead of making extra room upstairs doing keg stands for a few years.
I never attended college. I'm entirely self-taught. I've had a successful career.
For the first two-thirds of my career I was awfully satisfied with my own ability to assimilate and apply books, docs and discussion to my work - seemingly much faster than anyone I worked with.
Eventually, I found myself working on big, unique, urgent problems with a guy who was both college educated and had exceptional ability.
For the longest time I'd had ideas without the words to describe them. I could run something past this guy and almost always get a response like "What you're describing here is a..."
We ended up having hours of discussions that amounted to a crash course in computer science, all sorts of higher math, history and philosophy. Our talks didn't just teach me directly, they gave me conceptual footholds to make the next logical leaps - completely expanded my horizon.
I suddenly realized just how much I didn't know and how hard it is to even know where to look in order to learn.
I didn't need a structured education to be effective, but I can certainly see how it would enable an exceptional person to be that much better.
I don't think anyone would argue that college cannot expand the mind and enable brilliant people to do even more brilliant things. The argument, however, is whether that leads to increased income and access to jobs. The data, even outside of the popular anecdotes, seems to indicate generally not.