> Honestly, this advice applies to anyone anywhere. A good university teaches you things in a systematic manner, and teaches you things which you won't learn b

> Honestly, this advice applies to anyone anywhere. A good university teaches you things in a systematic manner, and teaches you things which you won't learn by yourself. It's not that you can't - most likely you won't. Universities like MIT and Stanford have been around for a long time, and a lot of thought has been given to designing courses. When you are in a university, your whole schedule is dedicated to learning, which generally isn't the case while learning on your own. There are many problems while learning CS which you will need help with. There are qualified peers and teachers available who you can go to. Universities make you learn unpleasant things - things which you won't be learning on your own. Most of the subjects require a basic investment before you learn to truly appreciate it(it's true for non cs as well - music, sports, painting etc). When you are on your own, you might very well become discouraged and not pursue it. Most of the self taught programmers don't understand lexing, parsing, advanced datastrucutres(think red-black tree, b-tree, tries, splay list), various locking protocols, memory management etc. The reason for it is it doesn't take much to cruise through your day job, and they don't see why they have to learn this stuff. But many jobs do demand your command over these topics, and top paid programmers are proficient in these, setting a precedent.