While I have no doubt this paid dividends for you, I'm not convinced that the cost/benefit is greater on the whole than alternatively spending those 4 years doing real-world development. Subjective, sure, but from my perspective there are too many amazing self-taught developers and too many subpar ones with degrees to automatically justify the 4 year time and money cost for the average person (concerning skill, career prospects have their own reasoning w/ degrees of course).
One of the biggest things one learns is the ability to self-teach. Unfortunately college charges a lot of time and money to learn via their chosen methodology which doesn't fit many people. At worst it can build a dependence on teacher-pupil classroom settings to learn new approaches, hence so many training sessions and stagnation in their absence.
As a tautology, it's not that one approach is necessarily better than another, but we must remember that one approach is not necessarily better than another.
One of the biggest things one learns is the ability to self-teach. Unfortunately college charges a lot of time and money to learn via their chosen methodology which doesn't fit many people. At worst it can build a dependence on teacher-pupil classroom settings to learn new approaches, hence so many training sessions and stagnation in their absence. As a tautology, it's not that one approach is necessarily better than another, but we must remember that one approach is not necessarily better than another.