The perception that "IT'S ALL AVAILABLE ON THE INTERNET" is a strictly CS thing. Outside of programming, you will find drastically less information online for free.
Sure you can buy the same textbooks and push yourself through them, but I'm 100% sure it would have taken me longer than 4 years to learn as much on my own as I did in college that was directly relevant to my day to day job. I'm not even sure if I could have gotten through the high end math without a lot of help.
Would you like a self taught doctor over one with a degree?
Can the self-taught doctor apply Bayes's Theorem correctly, unlike doctors with degrees? Is the self-taught doctor a fan of evidence-based medicine? I'll take them.
Nope but it is some form of metric that you can use to judge the doctor's capability.
With a self-taught doctor, you just have the questions that you ask to help you judge. With a doctor who's been through school, you have both your questions and the fact that he/she has been through what has been set out by the school issuing the degree.
I don't think anyone is claiming that there aren't freely available resources for learning the basics of other fields, so this isn't much of a counterexample.
> Outside of programming, you will find drastically less information online for free.
Areas differ, as always. There's an amazing amount of philosophy out there for free, for example. (I was recently impressed to see how much of Sextus Empiricus was available, and works on the Pyrrhonian skeptics in general.)
Sure you can buy the same textbooks and push yourself through them, but I'm 100% sure it would have taken me longer than 4 years to learn as much on my own as I did in college that was directly relevant to my day to day job. I'm not even sure if I could have gotten through the high end math without a lot of help.
Would you like a self taught doctor over one with a degree?