You can get a job with a portfolio in data science. Just go to kaggle and beat everybody in all competitions. That is worth more than a degree. Companies will t

You can get a job with a portfolio in data science. Just go to kaggle and beat everybody in all competitions. That is worth more than a degree. Companies will try to reach you if you can do it. But, honestly, I think it is very difficult to learn data science by yourself. Someone with experience teaching you will make a huge difference. Data science is different than programming as in programming you can see step by step what is happening, in data science most of times it either works or doesn't. And you know it after your algorithm has run through all data for at least an hour. It is really hard to learn this way, you need hints that only someone with experience can provide to you. Moreover you can do a lot of mistakes without knowing it, for example, when cleaning the dataset people use the whole dataset to fill gaps and them split it for training and test. It feels right but that it is a huge mistake that invalidates the whole experiment (because you use information from the test set in the train set, to fill the gaps).