I suggest getting a degree and putting in some hustle to get out with zero or little debt. Scholarship, side jobs, whatever it takes.
He was on to something, of course. But I'd already known that I march to the beat of my own drum.
I hit that same crisis my sophomore-junior years of college, but powered through it and finally learned the skill of hard work (which most other students had already mastered by high school).
I am going through the same thing, except I was in a hard high school program but ended up in a university with an easy Comp Sci program. I am a senior, and the graduate class I am taking this semester is the first time I have been mentally challenged by the Comp Sci department. Because of this, I tend to "give up" easily in other things that I am interested in but are harder (mathematics), or I am not motivated to build apps for fun and portfolio, even though the ideas and the languages come easy to me.
Some of my best successes have come from that, and from seeking out other areas in the company where people were doing that. HR was laboriously manually retyping and reformatting job listings although they were using a system with an RSS feed that could pull them in automatically. A half hour (or less) of coding permanently eliminated one of their daily drudge tasks so that they could focus on other things. No one asked me to do it because no one ever even thought of it, but they loved it.
Sometimes it's not worth automating or simplifying something, but it's usually worth considering or trying. Degreed people seem to have a 'this is the way I was taught' or 'this is the way it's always been done' mentality. That's not the way to innovation and big victories.
Degreed coworkers are great for quality control though - meticulous code reviews. And they seem to be usually better at organizing/planning (although not always as good at dealing with unplanned events).
Best is a mix of people that work well together despite their differences.
I was fortunate enough to get an in-office campus job my freshman year that I'll finally be leaving now due to getting an offer to continue my summer internship part time. But the experience of working hard, learning new things (Apache webservers can in fact have very shoddy configurations and issues..), and earning money that can be spent toward tuition and other bills is invaluable.
There's just something to be said about someone who just simply learned through absorption rather than through lectures/assignments/tests.
High school is training you to act the way mainstream society wants adults to act- find the clique you fit into, accept your place in the hierarchy, and do as you're told.
More and more, college is the same thing except specifically preparing you to be a professional. Because competition has grown so fierce emphasis is placed on skills that will get you a job. Results are measured based on your ability to pay back your loans. You just sit and listen and sit for the prime years of your life. This prepares you for life as a professional-- where you will sit and listen and sit away the rest of your productive years.
College is what you make of it. You can make something useful out of college. But you can also make something out of spending four years on a boat drifting around the south pacific. If you are going to be a filmmaker, you can benefit from four years of film school. But you could also benefit from just making movies for four years. Want to write software for some project you care about? Guess how the first generation learned before there were Computer Science programs? Yes, some studied Math or Physics and met the pioneers of the field. But the vast majority just taught themselves-- and they didnt have the Internet!
If you already have what you need to survive and are healthy, just figure out what ratio makes you happy of FUN vs. PROFIT vs. HELPFUL TO SOCIETY and do that shit for a few years. Then, reevaluate.