With the amount of content online, email, and a couple days per week of dedicated focus, you still can!
I think if you set a goal like "build x for y" and struggle through it, learning as you go, you'll learn faster because you skip all the stuff you don't need (because you literally didn't need it to hit your goal). And think of all the money you'll save!
Skip college. And if you already went, don't go back!
Most people who are successful as autodidacts are successful in college, it makes zero sense to avoid it if you're already the kind of person who learns well.
Most people are not great autodidacts, as shown by the miserable cometion rates of online courses.
My primary argument against college is mostly money at this point. The alternatives are so much cheaper in comparison to traditional college (both to produce and consume). The difference-in-quality argument is weaker and weaker.
I don't think free college for everyone fixes this either. It's like trying to solve the transportation problem by buying everyone ferraris. Free college is only good for colleges.
College is just a bad deal. A lot of people already realize this, but the idea of going to college if you care about your career at all is very firmly entrenched. 10-20 years from now, we'll look back at this period of going into debt just to get an education as being super weird and counterproductive. The people pushing the idea that this is somehow a good deal, very respectable people from respectable institutions, will be viewed as sub-prime pushers.
Way OT: Student debt, the war on drugs, prison, and medicine. These are the (US-centric) areas off the top of my head where people in the future will be like "what were they thinking?"
Meh, I'm an autodidact and I rarely complete a MOOC that I sign up for. There are many reasons for this. Quite a few try to just be copies of the campus course. Others focus too much on lecture and not enough on doing. In some courses, there is a huge disconnect between the difficulty of the assignments, and the content covered in the lectures. But the biggest reason for me is, I usually sign up for a course as a means to help me get going on a project. As soon as I'm up and going with the project, I leave the course behind. There are only a handful of courses where the content was so interesting and well paced that I stayed for the whole thing. The embedded electronics course at edx being one of them.
> Most people who are successful as autodidacts are successful in college,
Yes and no. I had troubles in college every now and then because it interfered with my learning. That is, as soon as I found something more interesting to learn by myself I tended to quit paying attention to classes. It was similar in school too. But I owe it my career - all things programming was what I was doing instead of school assignments.
To some extent, I think I had the opposite problem. University work harmed my enthusiasm for learning on my own.
Once I had to spend significant effort on my assigned work, I felt like I had to use my free time for leisure or I'd be wasting it. Plus any time I felt enthusiasm to learn something else, I'd feel like I ought to be spending that effort on my assigned work instead.
> Most people are not great autodidacts, as shown by the miserable cometion rates of online courses.
For me (though I consider myself as a pretty good autodidact) the reason why I didn't complete many MOOCs (before you had to pay to even get a certificate) was simply lack of time: My main "job" is completing a PhD in applied mathematics, so if there happened anything for my PhD work that required some time-intense intervention (say, I found out that my proof idea didn't work so well as I originally thought; or if the advisor got the idea (which does not mean that it was always a bad idea, just to be clear) that I should read up more papers in some specific area - also very autodidactic) I sometimes had no other choice than stopping some MOOC that I was attaining.
Generally, the stuff you need to get something done overlaps pretty well with the stuff you need to get other stuff done. Not 100% but enough you're probably not wasting your time.
It's at least as good a heuristic as "prof said it's important".
