edit: Plus, I know quite a lot of formally trained developers who at some point just stopped learning. To me that is much more dangerous than not having a formal education in the first place.
Which was kind of my point. The people who failed to get a degree are typically the people who won’t become great when they are self-taught either.
I can see why you would chose not to get an education in a country like America, where it would be a huge financial burden to do so, but we literally pay people to attend their free education.
We have a lot of self-taught programmers in my generation in the UK (I think mainly because of the BBC micro programme for schools a few decades ago). I've seen awful CS educated programmers and I've seen awful self-taught ones.
The two best programmers I know, one was self-taught and one was not.
The worst programmer I've ever known was formally educated, could quote you reams of technical specs, advanced CS, and managed to write 20 lines of not working code in 3 months.
I’m sure you can potentially get a CS degree and never learn anything but I don’t get the point that makes. I wouldn’t hire those people either. I don’t think it’s true though. I’ve never met anyone who went through 5 years of university without picking up anything useful.