You can learn anything you want to just by reading and doing. I've learned that over and over again in my life. I received advanced personal trainer certification back in the 90's. You were suppose to have a 2-4 year college degree in some medical field. I've never been to college. For about 15 some years I'd been bodybuilding and reading everything I could on nutrition, and the body how it works, like the krebs cycle how the muscle connect and work ect. I passed the test.
Problems with college these days are that you degrees could be worth nothing.
Lets say you want to be in computer sciences or an engineer. Ends up they go out of the country and hire India's people at 30 cents on the dollar.
We are competing with the slave labor of China and other third world nations from around the world.
Our unions took it too far the other way and ended up closing our manufacturing base for the most part.
My wife is in college right now, we are both lucky to be working as well and I can't say it is easy to suggest a path for her to follow where she could be guaranteed employment.
I have all kinds of friends, one of them is a professor who is also a world class lawyer in the taxation field.
He teaches at a major University here in CA and has seen the class sizes of his tripled because of Democrats coming into power.
Interesting times, sometimes a degree and other times not. Tough to know for sure anything in these tough times IMO.