I think the article missed one point: At a high achieving school, you have many opportunities to know other hackers. Learning together is the one of the quicke

I think the article missed one point: At a high achieving school, you have many opportunities to know other hackers. Learning together is the one of the quickest way to improve because you gain lesson learned insights from others that you don't have enough time to try out yourself. Of course, participating in open source projects can help but community participation and friendship building in physical world are much easier due to our nature. So it should be an advantage for going to school to learn programming.