Love the stories please keep them coming.
On college degrees, they are kinda necessary for engineers. Thats not something you want to learn by experience. College degrees allow you to learn from other peoples experience...
These days college is just motivation to learn something. You could just as quickly learn everything on your own, but most "kids" don't have enough self-motivation to do it, so college is a good choice.
I'd go as far as to say that you could learn things much faster on your own than in college. The motivation point strikes true though.