Going for my bachelors, most professors said we would have to spend at least three hours of study time for every hour we spent in lecture.<p>Splitting it up another way, that is three years of studying on my own, and one year of lectures.<p>If I had decided to forgo a bachelors, if I wanted the same level of knowledge as someone with a bachelors, I'd have to spend the same three years studying calculus, discrete math, theory of computation, graph theory, algorithms, data structures, databases, assembly, C++, Java, paradigms of programming languages, AI, graphics etc.<p>So really a bachelors is just one more year on top of that. Plus the extras you learn from the professor in class, or after class, or during office hours, or hanging around with other students.<p>While theoretically an autodidact can study the same as a college student, they generally skip over pushdown automata and Gödel numbers and L'Hôpital's rule and go right to learning things such as Ruby and its methods, without any theory. Some progress can be made initially, but the lack of a base of theory usually causes problems at some point.<p>You can get into a good local public school like Berkeley or UIUC or Georgia Tech for a decent price. You can apply for Pell grants, work/study and so forth.<p>During go-go times, you can often get work without a degree. During downturns like 2001 or 2008, suddenly everyone is laying people off, and the market is flooded with job applicants, many with college degrees. This is when you really need a college degree, especially if you have a family. You don't want then to be the time to realize you need a bachelors. Even if you get work again, you'll be juggling a full-time job, wife, kids, in-laws, plus your night/weekend classes and studying, in addition to whatever else you're doing.