I prefer dealing with the self taught. 20 years ago I was handling hiring for a company making accounting software, and EVERY fresh out of college kid I interviewed couldn't handle the simplest of questions. Worse when we did hire them we had to waste a year de-programming them from the manure the career educators had packed them full of.
I had encountered the same thing on the hardware side hiring for a mom and pop whitebox builder a few years before that, and again when I was running my own shop. The simplest of questions, like "how do you add a second drive to a PC compatible" you'd get a blank stare.
When at the time (early '90's) the correct answer would have been 'MFM, IDE, or SCSI?'
In my experience all coursework does is at BEST teach how to play "bullshit bingo" spewing marketspeak double-talk, and at worst teach you "programming paradigms" that result in nothing more than trying to shoe-horn the taught programming models (such as MVC) into places they don't fit (like PHP).
Seriously, half the time I deal with the "college educated" IT crowd I'm tempted to yell out "BINGO!"
But that could be related to my college education being in aeronautical engineering. Yeah, that worked out. NOBODY I know actually works in the field they went to college for.
The past fifteen to twenty years of dealing with web stuff? Same deal where the self-taught have more drive, useful knowledge, and are less prone to meaningless rhetoric.
It also speaks well of their work ethic; people go to school because it's expected by their parents or society as a whole, and because they think it will be a one-stop-shop for their "career". Someone who is self taught had the drive and interest to stay on track not because of getting a good grade, but because they wanted to actually learn!
I was gonna make a joke here, but deleted it as too political and offensive to the white collar criminal ivy league crowd.
In an industry that is always changing someone self-taught has the skills to keep up.
In an industry where 3 years is obsolete, 5 years is the scrapheap, what good is a 4 year learning program?
As Clemens wrote, "I never let my education get in the way of my learning."
Someone interested in learning it themselves can be truly competent in a year, a master in three or four. Someone who went to college "because" often takes two to 8 years of school just to get fudge packed with BS, and then another four to six years to unlearn all the trash they were saddled with to even start to approach competent.
To make a simile, it's like how people who actually know how networking works cannot pass the MSCE's networking section. The book and what educators say has dick-all to do with how things really work.
YMMV, but that's what my experience over the past 40 years says. Of course when I went to school there was no such thing as a degree in IT fields apart from two or three places my grades were nowhere good enough to get into. Said low grades being out of boredom from already knowing the material.