Higher Education or No?

My wife and I have serious differneces of opinion on this subject, and it was a subject of discussion on my talk radio station this morning. It got me thinking about IT work and college educations.

I started doing web work as a hobby/interest before classes were widely available, and degrees or certificates were not even a thought in educators minds. Fast forward over a decade, I am doing pretty well for myself as a self-taught web programmer/designer/marketer. There is one good reason for this, I started at the entery level in a couple of companies and learned a lot from some great mentors. While doing so, I was making money.

That being said, the commonly believed route of learning is going to college, spending a ton of money (and it's more each year) and learning the same things.

So, the cunundrum between my wife and is that I believe you are better off earning while you are learning in the real world, whereas she believes in spending to learn from books and lecture.

In my self-taught world, I have occassionally stumbled across a hole or two in my knowledge base, simply because something came up I had never encountered before, and perhaps a college course would have taught me that, but it hasn't been often.

If you are considering college for an IT career, step back and look at what possible entry level jobs in your area are available and evaluate the potentially learning that could come from it, while you are making money. In addition, know this; through my career and many, many interviews, I have only been asked about my formal education once, and that was because the job was at a college.