Isn't this our encounter with Sherlock Holmes, unable to see the merit in knowing that the Earth revolves around the sun? At the end of the day, if he does not subscribe to the theory that an educated person knows something other than their trade, or if he has no room for the linguistics which led Larry Wall to perl, or ascribes no value to learning about the aesthetics which motivated Donald Knuth to explore problems of computing, or care that "Alice in Wonderland" and Monty Python — with their absurdity constructed from rigorous logic — are so often referenced by computer folks, or even that the people from the field that he knows about were whip smart and could write, well, it's his life.
If the question is more accurately framed "How can I go to college without having to do college-y things?" then, why go to college? To have something on a piece of paper? To put a check on the form?
It may not help my code or my employability that I may compare and contrast John Steinbeck, Thomas Malory, and a Broadway play. I had that conversation recently, and, indeed, I did not get my points from some college course, now over 30 years from my past, but I did get a framework for discussion, for how to engage with ideas and debate and uncertainty and patterns. It may not help. It doesn't hurt.
Arthur Conan Doyle probably understood Watson and Holmes could be compared with Sancho Panza and Don Quixote. Because the stories suggest some research into and familiarity with science, psychology, and the art of medical diagnosis, it's hard to imagine that the author would have been successful had Sir Arthur limited his field of knowledge to literature featuring two male characters who embody a duality.
I think Doyle suggests that the cost of Holmes' singular focus was a miserable purposelessness which manifested in addiction when the game was not afoot. In fiction, this need not be pursued, especially as the stories were adored as puzzles and not as verisimilitude. Were Holmes real, he would have been a footnote footnoted with the sordid details of tragic dissipation. In the real world, people need the well to be refreshed, and so often the insight comes, as with Archimedes, when the mind is engaged "off-topic."
Don't go to college for the check mark, it's really the employers who care about that. Go for the experiences and ideas that one doesn't expect or that one dismisses without consideration. And do not discard the liberal arts. Those folks write, write, and write. If one doesn't go to college and write thousands and thousands of mush-headed words, one, arguably, wasted the money and most surely postponed writing the blather until the moment one's nascent career is on the line.