One of the weird things about college or university is that it gives one social license to spend four years, or more, learning something as an adult.
If you were not enrolled in a university, but instead diligently reading books, solving problems, writing essays etc. for four years without being otherwise employed, people would find you eccentric at the very least. But once officially enrolled at an educational institution, society thinks it is not only perfectly fine to do the same things, but to take on large amounts of debt for the privilege of doing so.
I did Electronic Engineering and about 60% of my year group are now all pure management. Some of the rest are "consultants". I'd say around 15% went into engineering.
I went to learn something & to have a damned good time doing it. A lot of people I met were there because they had nothing else to do and at least could get a job at the end.
Sadly these type of abstract advantages cannot be quantified and hence are always forgotten. If I took a degree for the money and not the interest then I would have chosen Economics or Management, not Physics! And what about those who chose foreign languages? Or literature? Etc...
Hopefully there's more than monetary advantages in going to uni.
And some of us went to college because we had to prove to HR people that we know what we know with very expensive pieces of paper. I stopped going to college after I didn't attend classes or buy books for a semester, and got substantially the same grades. I didn't attend classes or buy books because I wasn't extracting value congruent to the time and money it cost to attend class. I ultimately made the decision to not go at all because the amount of money I was making running my business exceeded the amount I could make with a degree working for someone else.
Computer science is probably one of the easiest fields to learn without formal instruction because deliberate practice is so easy and information is so accessible. The absolute most I learned in a college course was in a digital logic course. After the first class, the professor, whom I had before, took me to his office, told me I wouldn't learn anything in the class, gave me an FPGA development board (similar to http://www.altera.com/products/devkits/altera/kit-cyc2-2C20N..., fpga, ethernet, usb, flash card reader), told me to read about Verilog, build something interesting, and to not attend class, he'd just give me a grade on whatever I built. I implemented a basic computer that would read and execute instructions off the memory card. Almost everything in computer science came together once I implemented jump instructions. I got almost nothing out of most classes, but an incredible amount out of that one. College is tedious if you already know a lot about a subject.
If I could go back and was really interested in learning, I would have moved close to a college, and paid professors for short duration one-on-one instruction and guidance, probably just an hour or two a week, with independent study. It would have been substantially less expensive and more effective. You can't get a degree that way, but you can learn. I find the pacing of college courses to be too slow, if I am interested in learning about a new subject now, I'll get course videos and speed them up a bit, and skip ahead liberally. I can usually get through a semesters worth of lectures in a day.