Im anti-college, I believe that engineers and computer scientists should go to college, but programmers shouldn't. The majority of programmers aren't computer scientists.

I am anti-college for two reasons:

1-I didn't have the outside-the-class experience you did. In fact I think this is a situation where the top students naturally congregate together, in college and then on HN, and don't really have an understanding of what the non-top students go through. Most of them aren't making connections with other tinkerers.

2-I got a EE degree, but in my late 20's I become a professional programmer. I was instantly better than almost every other CS major I was working with. The majority of programming is closer to craftmanship than to Engineering. I don't think the knowledge learned in a CS degree is applicable, or even useful in day to day programming. The bits that are, can be learned.

(by the way, if your counter-argument is 'well I did VERY_HARD_THING_X within my companies app, and I would never have learned how to do this without my CS degree', I would say you may be a computer scientist, but also the vast majority of programmers arent doing this.)

The fact is, you go to college to earn a degree that says 'you are properly trained in this field to get a job'. Any profession that can be learned outside of an expensive college environment, should be.

Any argument that involves 'well you also get these nice benefits on the side' is irrelevant. If you are a smart go-getter, you would have met those tinkerers no matter what path you took. You would have done the same as an 18 year old apprentice programmer at Google.