Why $50,000 in loans? How about a state school? You can always get an MS at a private school later.
Getting a job may be easy now, but how about when it is like it was in 2001 or 2008? You will be competing for each job with several others who have a BSCS? That is for jobs that do not explicity require a BSCS. You may also be married with children then. You have the time now and lack financial obligations other than keeping yourself fed.
I know people like John Carmack and Jamie Zawinski are out there, but it very rare to meet someone without a college degree who knows what primitive recursive functions are, or how to design a four number binary adder with logic gates, or the difference between deterministic and nondeterministic pushdown automata and so forth. People without a degree might know all the keywords for a language, but are usually lacking on some abstract theoretical level. Another problem is not just what they do not know, it is what they do not even know that they do not know.
Of course you know your own personal situation better than any one else. But if you can go to school you should. Even two years of learning will help. But some of it is on you, tests and homeworks do not cut it, if you are learning an important subject, sometimes you should spend hours studying beyond what you need to get an A. Or doing independent projects to get some real world grasp of the some theory.
Getting a job may be easy now, but how about when it is like it was in 2001 or 2008? You will be competing for each job with several others who have a BSCS? That is for jobs that do not explicity require a BSCS. You may also be married with children then. You have the time now and lack financial obligations other than keeping yourself fed.
I know people like John Carmack and Jamie Zawinski are out there, but it very rare to meet someone without a college degree who knows what primitive recursive functions are, or how to design a four number binary adder with logic gates, or the difference between deterministic and nondeterministic pushdown automata and so forth. People without a degree might know all the keywords for a language, but are usually lacking on some abstract theoretical level. Another problem is not just what they do not know, it is what they do not even know that they do not know.
Of course you know your own personal situation better than any one else. But if you can go to school you should. Even two years of learning will help. But some of it is on you, tests and homeworks do not cut it, if you are learning an important subject, sometimes you should spend hours studying beyond what you need to get an A. Or doing independent projects to get some real world grasp of the some theory.