Do you need to go to college to learn Computer Science....college vs. THE INTERNET ?!

Great question !!
There is a wealth of information available online, and it can help you shape a very successful career. But all things being equal, a college degree gives you a leg up in your career. Majority of the employers are likely to give preference to a candidate with a degree from an accredited program.

In my opinion the ideal situation would be to obtain a college degree and continue lifelong training and education using online tools.

You should as a safety net. Learning through college is an "easier" set path however many have self taught themselves from the wealth of information available on the internet. It's possible to learn these skills without going to college however you'll need to be extremely disciplined and passionate about taking this path. Its not impossible but it will be very difficult.

The materials are always out there, and if you're self-disciplined and can network then you can probably get the same learnings on the internet as you would in college. However a college degree is an icon - it's an abstraction that summarizes for the world your accomplishments and credentials. Without the degree you will have a much more difficult time getting interest from potential employers - most won't take the time to deduce what you know when other candidates do have that degree.

You are right, all the required knowledge is out there on the internet. And yes, there are people that self-learn and are successful in finding jobs without a college degree but many employers favor college graduates and a lot of job postings will list that as a requirement.

But the one thing that college almost forces you to do is being disciplined. Sets deadlines, slight amount of healthy pressure, and those are life skills that are going to become handy in the workforce. It will also allow you to start having a network of professionals. Remember, your classmates will eventually graduate and in several year they each will be a very good resource for you.

Plus, college is probably going to end up being the best time of your life anyways!

Good question.

I am going to take the road less traveled and say that a college degree is not necessarily required for work in Computer Science - depending on your path chosen.

If you are very dedicated to learning, you can essentially get everything you need online (minus the social aspect) to create a strong portfolio in regards to Information Tech. Either in Networking, Programming, or other. However, this would work best in the programming side, as you can create a profile with actual applications you may have created.

That said, if you skip a university, you will need to excel and rely on networking (social) for finding a job. Which, in my opinion, is a stronger method to find a job than having a degree. (Having a degree AND networking would be the best choice, obviously).

In summary, if you are dedicated, and hard working, you can find almost any IT job without a university. Most individuals who have achieved greatness are really strong when it comes to self-teaching and the ability to learn new technologies.

College IS pricey, but scholarships are EVERYWHERE. Even small ones, 200 dollars even, are helpful. And you can earn them by showing proficiency on code contests, etc. I actually went to school without one big scholarship but lots of little ones and financial aid. I also didn't choose a school I couldn't afford. Many state schools have excellent Computer Science programs and those are very affordable. You could argue that lots of the geniuses dropped out of college (or didn't go), but none of them had to worry about money or had to move forward into a job to move out of the house and become independent. There's something to be said for carving a few years of your life out devoted to study and learning at an institute (where you don't have to focus on bills and the grind).

You should study Computer Science specifically because they teach foundational algorithms, data structures, and patterns. The field is bigger now so databases, data organization, warehousing, analytics, AI, hardware and IOT, and cryptocurrency are also new fields that have their own concepts to learn. You should always plan to do continuing study (I went on to do my Masters and even now use Udemy and Youtube and Codecademy and Stackskills to keep up). It will change forever and you will need these foundational skills to self-teach yourself new things.

From my perspective it always makes sense to get a college degree. It is not only the facts or the information you can get out of YouTube videos they teach you at college, it is a whole attitude towards studying and science that can only be comprehended by actually going there, at least that was my experience. None of that I could have picked up by selectively picking courses I liked our fund useful from the Internet.

I guess the bigger question is : Do you want to learn "Computer Science" for the "love of it" or to also "get a job"? As long as you want to just do it for the love of the subject, then yes - You can teach yourself and learn a lot from the internet. My degree was not in computer science and so I learnt things like "Data Structures and Algorithms" from YouTube videos to help me excel in technical interviews. I was amazed to find so many free resources online and to find MIT lectures in YouTube was pure bliss. All that helped me begin my journey to learn DS and Algorithms in greater detail. I later taught myself further by practicing and taking coding challenges in platforms like HackerRank and LeetCode where your goal is not just to solve the problem, but to do it in the most efficient way. So yes, you don't need to go to college to learn Computer Science. But if you want to make a career out of it, it always helps to have a college degree as most companies prefer candidates with a college degree. The other option of course is to learn from the sea of free resources in the internet and use that knowledge to contribute to the various open source communities and make your presence felt in the various developer communities and let your code in GitHub speak for yourself than any other expensive college degree. Needless to say, you also have the option to work on some of your own ideas and build your own product and team - in which you will be considered a prodigy and an entrepreneur building the next big thing, at which point having a degree or not doesn't really matter... Good luck!

Other than personality (as others have written) it also depends on what you want to *do* with computer science. Some math/statistics-heavy areas like machine learning are much easier to understand and do well in with a college-level math background.

As someone who did not get a CS degree, I often run into problems where I think "it would be nice to have had some classes on this..." Granted, I don't regret my path at all, but I've had to work really hard to fill in gaps that may have been addressed by a formal CS program.

All in all, I would say that being "well-rounded" in your education is more important than college itself. Because there is structure to college, people end up learning about subjects they might not have pursued otherwise which can be very helpful later on. That "well-roundedness" is somewhat baked into the curriculum at many schools.

The people I've seen who are most successful without a college degree (myself included) are those who have a general curiosity and try to learn a little bit about everything. The work has to be done either way, it just depends *how* you want to do it.

Hi,

In addition to the amazing advice above, I thought I would add my personal experience here. I recently was hiring to grow my data science team (not computer science, but my note still applies). My company had a blanket "all new hires MUST have at least a bachelor degree", and they are not the only one. While it may not be the best rule, when you get thousands of resumes you need to start applying some sort of filter to narrow down the applicants. Typically, education level is used as one of those filters.

This is not to say what you learned on the internet does not make you completely qualified as a computer science candidate, but without that degree many companies will dismiss you without giving you a second look.