Definitely! This prevailing sentiment that practical experience can replace a CS degree baffles me. There's a vast array of topics in CS that aren't encountered in 95% of typical programming tasks. Then you've got the greater efficiency of learning when you learn things directly and can interact mentors and other students. No book or tutorial will have all the details down like a human that understands something. Then there is the crafting of a holistic program that ensures students get exposed to the right topics in the right order, building a strong theoretical basis. Also, more advanced or cutting edge topics are not going to be well documented so the academic world is a great place to get exposure. Also, you don't have career pressure to meet business goals so you can focus on learning. Also, the time structure and social environment helps with people that aren't completely self driven yet (the majority of young adults?). And then you've got the entire collegiate experience which gives you skills and learning and networking beyond your chosen field. I could go on.

I think people who trash university education either never attended, went to a poor school, or were studying something they didn't care about and thus never engaged properly.

My thoughts exactly.

The worst part is: you don't even know what you are missing in the first place.

Since we are all into anecdotes today, let me give you mine:

My co-founder once called me with some aggravation, because he was developing a feature for a client that needed, in a nutsheel, to figure out which points, out of a few million, were inside some arbitrary geographical boundaries.

His naive algorithm was taking minutes to process all the data, but the requirement was for real-time(ish).

Turns out I didn't even get to apply the space partitioning techniques that I learned in class. Just explaining to him the concept of pre-calculating bounding boxes was more than enough for him to implement a solution in less than an hour.

Since he had not even heard of them, he didn't know what to look for, or that there was an entire class of algorithms and data structures in computer graphics dedicated to that sort of problem.

Don't even get me started with things like dynamic programming, or mathematical logic. Are you seriously going to study something like that for months, if there's no-one pushing you?

That's a lack of higher education... or of Google-fu: https://www.google.com/search?q=algorithm+find+points+inside...

yes, people will.

I'm of the opposite opinion to be honest. If you need to be pushed by someone else to learn something then why would you do it?

I'm self taught, and I did. For game dev. Nothing like trying to build an RTS or 3D engine to force you to learn as much math as you can handle.

> but there is certainly much in CS that you will simply never learn in the field.

Like what? In other words, what parts of undergrad CS could you not learn on your own from the books given reasonable amount of time, you figure?

Well now you've changed the goalposts with "a reasonable amount of time" and self-study rather than industry experience. More to the "experience" point, I can't think of many jobs that will expose you to the sheer breadth of a good undergrad CS curriculum: think a solid foundation in algorithms, networking, calculus, linear algebra, databases, advanced algorithms (randomized, approximation), programming languages, compiler design, ai of various sorts, numerical methods, theory of computation, to name the big ones.

The top comment literally said "given books and free time." Not exactly moving goalposts.

See the part of the comment I quoted.

Okaaaaayyy, but then it's you that's moving the goalposts. The part you quoted must be taken in the context of the rest of the comment.

Someone's got to research the theories that you've read in the books. These are the kind of things you won't be able to learn in your spare time.

The issue comes down to whether it's reasonable to expect a very large number of people to try to emulate the work of the true professional theorists. For the average programmer, it might be nice to know once in a while, but why this continued emphasis on a (formal) theoretical background?