With all due respect,i disagree with you.I have a master degree in computer science from a university in Chicago and i can tell you that most of these courses can be learned by yourself.You just need to be self-disciplined and self-motivated.And constantly ready to learn.This field is all about continuous learning.Nobody teaches me Chef,Docker,Ansible,AWS in the university. Infact, American tech industry moves faster than most computer science departments in terms of new technology. When i look at the course outline of online Master in Computer science from Georgia Tech last week,i laughed.You know what,you can learn it by yourself.Please see http://www.omscs.gatech.edu/courses/

I am a big fan of college education.But computer science is just not one of them.That is my experience.YMMV.My CTO has a degree in Visual Communication.He taught himself all what he knows.You know what,we both earn six figures,i can tell you that you wont know that he does not have any degree in computer science.

Computer Science is math. Chef, Docker, Ansible, AWS are industry technologies. You don't go learn CS to learn these, you want a trade school instead. Industry generally doesn't even work on the same problems that university CS departments work on.

In industry, a "hard" problem is one that takes more than a few weeks to solve. In academia, a hard problem is one that you don't even know if you can solve, let alone put a time frame on it.

And yes, you can learn anything on your own, but the number of people who actually go and learn the deep maths on their own is vanishingly small.

> I have a master degree in computer science from a university in Chicago and i can tell you that most of these courses can be learned by yourself.

Is there any skill in the planet that cannot be learned by yourself, given enough time?

Now, if you do have the self-discipline to learn everything, at the same level, without a teacher supervising and pointing out the mistakes you didn't even know you had made, congratulations.

In that case, though, why wouldn't you enroll anyway? It's like a self-signed certificate. You may have a valid one, but having someone else to validate gives it more credibility.

Well,you guys are part of the problem.That is high school kids end up spending/getting loans to go to college to study course they can easily learn at a fraction cost by themselves.

And not too distance reasons why boot-camps are everywhere.You try to make computer science/tech looks like extra ordinary adventures.I repeat you don't need four walls of university to learn almost everything you need to know in computer science.

If i had had information that i have now,i would have dropped out of college in a heartbeat.I don't need to give you any example of people who drop out of computer science study and still excel.They are everywhere.Don't say that these folks are exception because they are not.

I understand that some folks need structure to excel in anywhere they find themselves in life.

Horses for courses I guess. Personally, I don't see the basic volatile tech belonging to CS curriculum at all, it's the things you pick up from user manuals on your way of doing bigger things.

And with all these MA,MS,MA,PhD in CS and their curriculum,you end up working for someone with a high school diploma that still bosses you around.

Do you assume that I would be a CTO of anything had I not stuck in the school, or? I didn't say that grad school is a shortcut to financial success, just a shortcut to understanding the harder CS problems.

>Finite state automations, Fourier transforms, dynamic programming, formal grammars, graph theory.. are not something I could be able to casually pick up with just high school knowledge and fumbling around

Was no real problem for me. (Though not 'casually' as I head to read up quiet a bit).

Well to understand Fourier transform for example you need to master the better part of the calculus as prerequisite. Did you get all the way to convolution theorem without taking any math classes? Then congrats, I'm certainly not in your ballpark.

IOI and IOM contestants (and those who do both) probably know much of the material. Most of them aren't geniuses, just kids with persistence, good guidance and lots of time on their hands.

I was an OI contestant but only a mediocre one at a national level. We've been trained by brilliant teachers until our noses bled, it does not qualify under "on your own" at all.