If you cross a bridge do you have the same kind of trust in its stability if it's constructed and inspected by engineers with a college degree or some guys who played bridge builder?
But (at least in the US) you go to your smart friend who taught himself through the Internet unless you're lucky enough to have actual doctor friend before you step foot in a doctor's office for anything weird because otherwise it's a waste of a copay. If I go to the doctor who went to doctor school and say I have this and that, they're gonna run some random tests and then you have to go back in a second time to run more tests. If you go into the office advocating for specific tests you want run, with scientific papers as reasons for wanting them run, then you'll get the tests you need the first time around, with informative results (positive or negative or wherever you are on the scale) in fewer visits than if you didn't ask your smart friend. If you go into a specialist doctor's office without having a list of questions to ask, for your problem, you're not getting good value for your time/money. Covid exposed a number of shortcomings in the system, and if your malidy is at all weird, you're screwed.
This is by definition pennywise pound foolish, and this is a very specific example, so I think it's something you do.
I'm going to assume you are a decently paid white collar worker (earning $70k+ a year) and tell you that you should not think this way.
I'm not denying that you can't self learn, but most people don't have the discipline and drive needed to reach that place. Nor will the self learner pass the hiring bar for a junior role in 2024 anymore.
Non-traditional college education (eg. low cost online education, expanded community college access, asynchronous learning, etc) is a happy medium and was in fact the norm for college education in the US throughout much of the 20th century (the normalization of the residential dorm model is a newish innovation - most students were historically commuter students from the early 20th century with CUNY all the way to the CSUs and UC extensions of the late 20th century).
Programs like ASU or OSU's online BSCS are a better middle ground.
