[protomyth]

A lot of colleges have Older Than Average programs. They not only are accelerated ways to get your degree, but meet at night to make them easier to continue your career. I've had a couple of relatives go this route. They tend to have a lot more support available.

Students starting after 40 is actually fairly normal at the Native American colleges. Our TCU (tribal college or university) has a lot of almost independent work classes to support this. If anyone needs a suggestion to help single mothers, find instructors willing to teach remote / zoom classes starting a 9PM.

[Ologn]

For my Bachelors I was in one of these programs. You get some accelerated credit for experience and classes outside my major (CS) were available at night or on weekends. Many CS classes were available at night as well.

In terms of people talking about debt - I went to a decent state school, took one class a semester or much of it and paid as I went - so there was not much financial strain. I work in IT and am in a higher tax bracket after all. On the other side of finance, during interviews I can talk about my college experience if asked about it. Also Leetcode interviews and the like seems to be a test if I remember what I learned in college - dynamic programming, big O notation, how to implement a stack etc. So you pay in terms of time and money but you get paid back in terms of possibly greater opportunities.

Insofar as people talking about learning on your own - as far as I see, most self-taught people tend to have gaps in knowing more theoretical stuff like pushdown automata, or concurrent critical sections, or abstract syntax trees or Goedel numbers or second normal form or that kind of thing. You're supposed to spend at least three times as much time studying as in class, so if a Bachelors is four years, those three years are similar to self-study, minus things like the chance at the chance of questions during and after class and during office hours. So the only difference from self-study is not four years but one year, minus the benefits of classmates, professors and the rigor of a more theoretical curriculum than most self-taught people do, if they even know they should learn about things like the pumping lemma.