Some people claim college is the new HS, a new baseline that everybody is reaching. Why shouldn't hiring managers work with that baseline?
No, you're not going to Stanford on that, but you can still go to a good school with a respectable reputation for teaching, if not research.
I know there's a thing called community college. Does it cost money? Is a degree from one of those worth so much less than one from MIT/Stanford/Harvard/Yale/Caltech/etc?
Add in the cost of books, and the total cost of a "budget" college education in Pennsylvania is roughly $55,0000.
As a counterpoint, a private engineering school like Drexel University (also in Pennsylvania) currently costs $51,405/yr, plus books, for a five year program, for a total in the $250-275,000 neighborhood.
(Also, many private institutions, namely the ones with pretty nice endowments, have gone the route of covering most, if not all, of their students' tuition expenses.)
If you want to trade anecdotes: I'm 25 and have been out of college for about two and a half years. I spent two years at TripAdvisor and now oversee mobile development at a funded startup that actually, unlike certain TechCrunch favorites, has a thing called a "revenue model". I have about $3K left on my student loans which I haven't paid back because the interest rates aren't high enough to bug me; I would rather have enough in easily liquified assets to take a year off on a whim.
I went into college a "pretty good" programmer. I came out a better hacker due to side projects and a better thinker because of the stuff college, both inside of CS and out, threw at me. I recommend it to pretty much everyone going into software development because without it you literally don't know what you're missing. College opens doors. It sounds trite, but it's true: it forces you to broaden your horizons in ways you may not have considered, it encourages you to build social connections among people not like you (which, sure, you might do, but let's be honest, most hackers don't), and, if you go somewhere with a decent CS background, puts a pretty handy layer of formalism on top of what a decent developer knows intuitively. It's the stuff "outside the lines" that I feel makes college so valuable.
You sound like you're doing well for yourself, and congratulations! That's not an easy road. But I'd say that while the 0.1% probability outcome for college and no-college is about the same, I'd also suggest that delta at most other points tilts very hard towards college, even factoring in opportunity costs.