I agree that self-teaching is a very important skill, but it is a skill that I learned in my university time. It itself is a self taught skill, of course. At least in Germany, lectures are not compulsory, and if I find I don't learn enough, I go home and try to understand it on my own.

Second, I dispute that spending those 4 years doing real-world development would have yielded greater benefit. The thing is, he'll be doing his whole life real-world development, so the longer he is in the profession, the smaller the benefit of the additional amount of experience will be. On the other hand, in the four years of college, he has the chance to learn some other stuff deep in a way that he won't have the chance while he's working.