I'd say it depends on the kind of person you are. Some people are fine actually learning the concepts (or actually learning anything) on their own, while others

I'd say it depends on the kind of person you are. Some people are fine actually learning the concepts (or actually learning anything) on their own, while others might have a problem. I attended college for a year, but eventually dropped out after a year to start working as a C++ programmer. I'm working on games but currently I'm focussing on some advanced machine learning related systems. I haven't really had a problem with the majority of the concepts, so from my experience I'd say you can do it if you really want to. If your global knowledge of maths is decent you should be fine on the majority of the stuff. Attending a top school will help you to establish a good CS base on which you can build and will also give you some good networking opportunities, while attending classes of a less good CS program probably aren't really worth it.