Formal education in my opinion is really only good for one thing when determining how good of a hire someone will be. Ensuring a certain level of exposure to ar

Formal education in my opinion is really only good for one thing when determining how good of a hire someone will be. Ensuring a certain level of exposure to areas that may otherwise be overlooked in self study. When people learn things by themselves they tend to focus on what they love the most and have a tendency to ignore what they don't. Formal education forces you to learn all areas that are covered and often bring things to light that are very useful, but would often be overlooked in selfstudy. So formal education provides a base-line level of exposure to a lot of topics, what a student chooses to do with this level of exposure is what will determine wether they will succeed.