But wouldn't a Ph.D., as in reading research papers and arriving at some unique new insight, be closer to "self-taught" than "taught existing knowledge from someone's lecture"?
On a more general note, I think people should not make claims about what happens in situations (e.g. PhD programs) that one has not experienced herself. Claims like "whatever that person learned in college could have been learned outside college" is too often false simply because no one person can experience both sides of the debate.
I don't think the first hand experience has much value except to the individual experiencing it.
As to the value of a PhD; it's a social construct afaik. It's value is in the reputation you build which is vetted by other PhDs and organizations, your dissertations and debates, by the body of work you publish, and so on. Take all of that away and you're left with just the knowledge which is pretty much available to anyone with half a brain and a spark of curiosity.
It's ludicrous to think that I should invest years of my life and more money than most people make in a year in order to learn how to develop an operating system. That knowledge is freely available and easily accessible. Computer vision? Check. Machine learning? Check. Statistics? Check. You don't go to university for a CS degree in order to learn how to program operating systems or figure out data structures. That would be an incredible waste of time and money.
Someone who is self-taught is simply self-taught. They may have decided that they don't need the rigors of a formal education. Perhaps they don't care about publishing papers and defending them against critics. However, there's no way to say quantatively that a self-taught programmer is better or worse than a formally educated one. It's purely a value statement and one I find is loaded with a lot of FUD.
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~sergey/ http://infolab.stanford.edu/~page/
If you think I am implying the PhD's do not produce important work, I think you are mistaken.
You can do it all by your self, it's just going to more time to find funding and partners. Something your competitors in SV would have an upper hand with.
* http://source.android.com/source/submit-patches.html