Technically, no, it wouldn't. Not as you stated it. College being uniquely suitable for learning a subject does not ensure that someone will learn it if they go

Technically, no, it wouldn't. Not as you stated it. College being uniquely suitable for learning a subject does not ensure that someone will learn it if they go to college. You can say that to learn x you must go to college. If you went to college though the fact that you did or did not learn x says nothing about whether you need to go to college or not to learn it. You get drilled with exactly this type of logic problem a LOT in discrete math courses. Stuff there's no way the extreme vast majority of working programmers would study on their own just because. That's being pedantic though, I imagine you're saying that it doesn't matter whether you go to college or not since you can make the same kind of mistakes when you get out. The latter part of which is true. But there's no doubt in my mind that had the guy that did go to college would be a lot worse had he not gone. He'd most probably not be able to write code that worked at all rather than code that works but not as optimally as it could.