You mention you don't want to work for the man, this sounds like you'd prefer to go freelance or start your own business. Given that and the fact, which I'll ac

You mention you don't want to work for the man, this sounds like you'd prefer to go freelance or start your own business. Given that and the fact, which I'll accept at face value, that you're a bad ass developer who knows big O notation and can code your own lists and trees and hashes, and you did fine in your math classes, and if you did go to college it would be to get a CS degree, then I would say no, don't go to college, it will be a waste of time compared to what you could have done by not going to college, in particular starting a business while traveling the world and not going into debt. If you are not a trust fund child, the debt loan from college will definitely prevent you from starting your own business and ensure that you have to work for the man whether you want to or not. If you decide to go to college later, that's fine too and maybe by then you'll have a hankering to study philosophy or russian literature or such and do so without going into debt because you are already running a multi billion dollar company that you founded yourself. You sound a lot like me. I was designing embedded systems and writing operating systems in machine language by the time I was 16. I ran into problems dealing with concurrency, read a number of papers, had some solutions, but felt there had to be a better way, and so off to college I went, and I got into one of the best engineering schools there was (Stanford). After four years, I had not learned a single useful thing and discussions with top professors in the field taught me only that not only had almost no professors at top engineering schools have ever written and released to the public a program more than a couple thousand lines of code long, but also these jokers don't know anything about developing software. So it was a big waste of money. If I had majored in art or history or something like that it might have been worth it because I wouldn't have been pulling all nighters to finish labs that were busy work, and probably gotten more sex with hot girls, and learned something interesting that I didn't already know. If I skipped college, I would have gotten a 4 year head start on my career and I wouldn't have had to pay off $50,000 in loans right away, which required that I had to work corporate BS for several years to pay off before quitting and doing my own thing. So, for your specific case, and speaking from my own personal experience, don't go.