Many are working towards abstracting schooling out of a being a developer, great.
That also means we're moving towards making being a developer a blue collar job rather than a white collar job. We're also making private businesses now the trainers of labor.
The time to be a dropout rockstar developer was in the 2000s but we're moving towards 2020 now.
The real question is meant for the generation of 13 yo now in the next 5 years. They can study software development on their own but in 10 years time, will they be better spending half of that with expensive college education or nah.
Everyone in this thread are giving out answers based on their own experience surviving the past 20 years as if what happened the last 20 years in the tech industry is where we're at right now or will be going forward the next 20.
I wrote this on hardware and software made by and improved by organizations of highly educated and highly specialized people. It's incredulous to think the future is only going to be built by Lucky Palmers and 16 yo hacker geniuses.