Excellent point. If you want to waste 4-6 years of your life on theory, go to college. Bootcamp it or learn yourself if you want to spend 6-18 months learning and then jump into a junior position to get real experience (and get paid for it).
EDIT: See my post further down for clarification on this idea. I shot this comment from the hip a bit too fast.
I don't want to rip on you, because I think you're a pretty sharp dude from your posting here, but if you think theory is a waste, I really question what sorts of Actually Hard Problems you've had to tackle. :/
I'm a high school dropout and have started/ran/sold a startup, managed a division for a well-regarded consulting firm, and worked on data taking for a detector at the LHC. Perhaps the problem is that I minimize the amount of effort that goes into being autodidactic (determine the problem, determine what information and skills are needed to solve the problem, acquire said information/skills, execute, repeat).
Let me correct/clarify my above post: Theory isn't a waste, per se. Is it best to spend a significant amount of time front loading knowledge one may not need? And paying a substantial premium for that experience? That's my problem with the college experience for tech professionals.
I'm not a huge fan of bootcamps, but I do believe there is much to be gained by Google's efforts here. There is value we've lost in the old apprenticeship system, and I hope to see it revived over time (I owe my skill and career progression to the luck of finding quality mentors along my way).
There are hard problems I want to solve that I want to have the resources (mostly time) to solve. College would not teach my those skills, but me trying to solve those problems are lessons in themselves.
YMM, of course, V, but I've used almost everything I ran into in my collegiate CS-related courses in some form or another. And I find that the stuff that I haven't directly used has contributed to my ability to solve problems--having the prerequisites to be able to assimilate into my corpus of knowledge pretty random stuff has served me extremely well. Much more importantly to me, however, I was exposed to things outside of "that computer stuff" that have made me better at being a manager, a leader, and (as hokey as it sounds) a human being. I literally can't put a price tag on it, but I would be vastly poorer as a person without a liberal education that I think gets aggressively discounted when attempting to view college in purely transactional terms. It is a much greater criticism of college, to me, that a student has to go looking for this stuff; the existence of bachelor's degrees that are functionally trade-school materials is troubling to me. I deal with a lot of technical people who are pretty aggressively ignorant of things that don't involve keyboards or oscilloscopes, and I think that is the greater failure of the American collegiate system.
Don't get me wrong--I'm self-taught too, I'd been writing code for a decade-ish before I went to college, but this stuff changed my life profoundly, and I think minimizing it out of hand is downright tragic. Maybe if there was a better way to get people to acquire this a few years on (calling to mind the idea that people should have a few years of experience before getting an MBA), but there isn't right now.
As far as paying a premium goes--I graduated with about $20K of debt, mostly because it was effectively free money (my total interest payments before I paid them off were less than $2K), and was getting paid through school (did Google Summer of Code twice, ran my own web dev shop, etc.). Bad choices can be made with regards to college, but that's a criticism of overly expensive (private) colleges.
The tech industry currently doesn't need any more people to work on the Actually Hard Problems.
The tech industry currently pays people 6 figure salaries to build CRUD apps. There is such a huge shortage of tech people, that the industry can't even get the "Easy", low hanging fruit work done.
It doesn't matter how many PHDs work at Tesla designing space cars if the world has a cronic shortage of car mechanics. And right now the car mechanics get 6 figure salaries.
EDIT: See my post further down for clarification on this idea. I shot this comment from the hip a bit too fast.