I think you woefully underestimate how many people are learning CS without being told to. I took Jeff Ullman's automata course on Coursera and so have many, man

I think you woefully underestimate how many people are learning CS without being told to. I took Jeff Ullman's automata course on Coursera and so have many, many others. MIT's OCW classes have also been used by people doing entire CS degrees. Back when I was at my previous job I was doing to the same for another degree. I've heard these arguments before and to be honest, they remind me a lot of when I moved to Taiwan as a young adult. It seemed there were always people telling me how foreigners couldn't learn Chinese "properly" without doing college courses...right up until it started becoming common about five years ago. Now language learning is practically a sport amongst autodidacts. The credential from a degree is an edge, but in terms of actual education, schooling is hardly the optimal approach.