alt Hacker NewsThis is one of the only skills you can learn for practically nothing. A cheap laptop is all you need. I taught myself enough to get a middle class job with nothing but free time and 3$ iced coffees.
I just don’t like the idea of gate keeping it behind an expensive degree. The source code for most popular frameworks and tools is free for anyone to read.
It’s not like medicine or something where you need to drop 300k on education.
No, it's certainly not like medicine or law. And you can certainly aquire skills on your own.
Of course, in this field, learning is continuous. You're not going to use just one language (much less one framework) over a decades-long career. It's also likely that your domain will change, your focus area and so on.
A good college course doesn't prepare you for programming in one language, but all of them. (In the sense that once you understand the theory of programming, language is just syntax.)
You get exposure to different types of languages (imperative, functional etc).
I think for me the critical takeaways though were research, critical thinking and communication. The "skills" are easy to learn yourself, but the formality in which you place that learning is harder to do yourself.
Which is not to say a degree is a requirement- it's clearly not. But it's helpful because it builds a strong foundation on which the self-learning can rest.