>Learning to code can be done on your own time, and you can get a job without a degree,

In a vacuum, yes. In reality, I'm not sure I would have gotten past courses in stuff like Systems, compilers, and networks without being able to poke at peers and professors alike in order to get my head around them. Maybe some curated masterclasses could do the same thing for cheaper ("hundreds" instead of thousands), but those are a much more recent phenomenon; certainly not something widely known nor available a decade ago when I started school.

It's also a matter of "you don't know what you dont know". There are all kinds of stories of prodigies who were tinkering with code since they were 10. Meanwhile, I'm a graphics engineer, and I didn't even know what DirectX was until my 2nd year of college. It's an affordance that is increasingly less of an option, but the ability to see and dabble in different domains really helped me shape what I enjoyed or didn't. Without that experimentation, I saw myself freshman year working as an Android app developer. That changed quickly.

There's a lot of factors to take into account.