If you had to depend on a teacher to expose you to the books you should read, what about the rest of your career?

I'd never pick a book about B trees on my own (booooring, let's learn LatestFramework.js).

No, but if I needed to know about how to optimize MySQL, I would do research on - how to optimize MySQL.

My University professors were mostly a complete disaster but at least the materials we had were good enough. Who wanted to learn had access to knowledge, and for motivation -- at least the grades.

I doubt that there is a dirth of knowledge between the free information you can get and paid courses online.

I can't see myself on my own even finding a book about theory and then going through it for 4 months, getting into nitty gritty details just for the kick of it. There's no obvious benefit at the time of learning it. By the time you can see the benefit on your own, it could be too late.

There was no obvious benefit from me learning 65C02 assembly language and BASIC in the 6th grade. But I did it anyway. There was no benefit from me spending hours on the comp.lang Usenet groups in college. For any software developer though, there is an obvious benefit from having a deep understanding in marketable technologies - competitiveness in the job market.