"Now, you should definitely get a CS degree or similar if you want to be a programmer. I would have done a lot better having one even though I got by without it

"Now, you should definitely get a CS degree or similar if you want to be a programmer. I would have done a lot better having one even though I got by without it. Also, my career path was ridiculous and is entirely non-replicable." I'm wondering for how long Americans are going to be exploited like that. I mean getting a degree is never a bad idea but in my country (Poland) unis are FREE yet I never went to one and roughly 80% of my programming friends never did or they studied something entirely different. And we're working everywhere from big banks in London through Swiss pharma companies, European Commission in Belgium, to Opera or Google. I never got asked if I have any formal education after my first 2 years in IT. The best programmers I know are mostly all self-taught. Almost all the successful ones are. The "educated" ones often become corporate slaves making pennies in places like Samsung's R&D. I know American unis are top-notch but I suppose it's still better to start learning on your own than to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for something else than TOP5 or TOP10 unis. And most likely it's even not worth (money-wise) paying that much for those. I suppose we will need not thousands but millions of coders in next decades, right now I'm getting like 50 messages from headhunters any given day, I don't think even if we tried it will be virtually impossible to push so many people through education system at that pace. Also, especially programming is virtually impossible to learn in any other way than coding for years. It's really handy to have some strong technical background but once you put the time and work in it will work out regardless. Of course again it's better to have the education, but hey, if costs as much as a house maybe it's not the best idea after all. Furthermore ot everyone has to be an architect or CTO (BTW I still know extremely good architects and CTOs without degrees). tl;dr there are possibly millions of degreeless programmers in Europe, can't wrap my mind around the US education situation, could someone clarify why are things the way they are?