I've been programming before I got into university, and for me, there would have been a lot of stuff I wouldn't have gone to learn on my own if I hadn't heard a

I've been programming before I got into university, and for me, there would have been a lot of stuff I wouldn't have gone to learn on my own if I hadn't heard about it in university. Going to university exposed me to new ideas I could further explore deeply in my own time. It also help formalised some of my knowledge, for example the language theory behind regular expressions, as well as what OOP means exactly. More ways to describe concepts in my head, I think, has helped me compose bigger ideas. Today I'm working as a web developer using Django in Python. I'd imagine if it wasn't for having watched my professor demonstrate a cgi C program web server, I wouldn't have gone on to dig up rabbit holes in php, rails, app-engine, and finally django in my own time, and I suppose rather than working as a web developer (and doing "real engineering" using version control, unit testing, integration testing, etc... all of which I first heard about in university and then further explored in my own time) I'd be slaving away in a company which works without version control and wouldn't know any better. And yes, don't laugh, I have indeed worked in a company part time without version control, before I learnt about it in university; when I did learn about it I introduced it to the company, and then quit. Let me tell you they were very grateful I told them about it. Nowadays they no longer merge code by hand. "Next year I'm dropping out, I can learn 10 times more on my own than here..." I have found that to be generally true, i.e. I learn 10 times faster, on my own time, than attending lectures and doing tutorials and doing assignments, all of which were dumbed down for the average student, but in spite of that, university has still been worth it for me.