The Value of College (Score 1)

I spent the past 10 years programming, you can't say you can learn what I've learned by hanging out with your friends and going to college.

Most decent universities that I know of have a program called Computer Science, your mileage may vary. (Especially if you ignore lecture to /., as I am now.)

It's called experience.

In my experience, going to work in the "real world" the programmer with 15 years of "experience" wrote 100% pure www.thedailywtf.com worthy code, he quit shortly after I started submitting patches. Couldn't stand the egg on his face.
Lets not get started with the one with 20 years experience.

I'm not saying that experience is valueless, indeed, the best of the outgoing students are the ones who do their own programming projects, and gain experience that way. However academic study of computer science is very important to be a decent programmer, such academic study can be had from books, but it must be had somewhere.