Notable autodidacts
Occasionally, individuals have sought to excel in subjects outside the mainstream of conventional education:
Socrates, Avicenna, Benjamin Franklin, George Bernard Shaw, Feodor Chaliapin, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Alva Edison and many others were autodidacts. Karl Popper never took courses in philosophy and he did his initial work in the philosophy of science during the late 1920s and early 1930s while he was teaching science and math in high school. He then turned to the social sciences and attempted to transform them as well, again without any formal training or official mentoring. The best source for this story is Malachi Hacohen's book "Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902-1945".
The cognitive scientist Walter Pitts from the MIT was an autodidact. He taught himself mathematical logic, psychology and neuroscience. He was one of the scientists who laid the foundations of cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence and cybernetics.
Forensic facial reconstruction artist Frank Bender is self-taught. His well-known forensic career started off with a day trip to a morgue, asked to try to put a face on the deceased, brought measurements home, created a successful facial reconstruction that led to his first (of many) IDs. He only took one semester of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
Mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan and Newton's contemporary Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz were largely self-taught in mathematics, as was Oliver Heaviside. Ramanujan is notable as an autodidact for having developed thousands of new mathematical theorems despite having no formal education in mathematics.
A number of famous British scientists in the nineteenth century taught themselves. The chemist and physicist Michael Faraday, the natural historians Alfred Russel Wallace (co-discoverer of natural selection) and Henry Walter Bates, "Darwin's Bulldog" Thomas Henry Huxley, the social philosopher Herbert Spencer.
Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea depicts an autodidact who is a self-deluding dilettante.
Physicist and Judo expert Moshe Feldenkrais developed an autodidactic method of self-improvement based on his own experience with self-directed learning in physiology and neurology. He was motivated by his own crippling knee injury.
Gerda Alexander, Heinrich Jacoby, and a number of other 20th century European innovators worked out methods of self-development which stressed intelligent sensitivity and awareness.
John Boyd, fighter pilot and military strategist, was an accomplished autodidact who not only revolutionized fighter aircraft design, but also developed new theories on learning and creativity.
Mythologist Joseph Campbell exemplified the autodidactic method. Following completion of his masters degree, Campbell decided not to go forward with his plans to earn a doctorate, and he went into the woods in upstate New York, reading deeply for five years. According to poet and author Robert Bly, a friend of Campbell's, Campbell developed a systematic program of reading nine hours a day.
The musician Frank Zappa is noted for his exhortation, "Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read."
Mark Twain is known to have said: "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."

I know, I know, they don't list the cranks, but still.....:)

It is probably too late to return to an earlier era when education was acquired for modest cost at colleges and universities.
These institutions now mostly serve the purpose of indoctrination into corporate society and getting an access ticket. And of course that ticket should cost a lot of money.
Plus, a heavy debt load will keep the little fuckers quiet, submissive and out of the streets protesting things they have no business in.
Reagan's introduction of fees into the California university system as a tactic in the culture wars was quite effective.
Debt slavery and dumbing down is all it is.

Cost of education has little to do with debt and submission. It is more important for the government to minmize the risk it takes when it's attmepting foster the growth of an economy. In fact since accountability is placed on the students, and bank rolle dby the government, the educational system can be extremely competitive.

As far as unusuallly self taught people. Well there have been many successful selftaught people in the past, but those people aren't really important, because there are so few. Institutionalism is the way for the average person to become more valuable to society, and it cannot, and has no reason, to handle outliers.

Besides if education were free.. should we make food free too? Or should we have people compete for both? I choose compete.

Do we want America to be a country full of ignorant, superstitious peasants (like today), or do we want America to have a reasonably affluent, educated, capable middle class?

The only answer I can think of is..."Duh."
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Good times for Smiley! :-D

“The administration has decided that it wants to capture the profits of federal student loans,....”

Is this guy projecting or what? This is exactly how corporate America thinks — "capture the profits," "capture market share," "capture (fill in the blank)." They hate (fear) "socialism" because there is nothing for them to capture.

not to my born here son but to illegals. My wife tells me a Brazilian here illegally gets full tuition to a high school once reserved for the most elite of those groomed for success American blueblood families.

While privatizing the profits. That's the only kind of socialism these capitalist robber-barons understand. And they like it, a lot...

Apocalypse Khan

That a smart and driven person can learn almost anything. Of course, this person would need the time to do so (and if you work 60 hours a week to support yourself, there is not much time or energy left). But if you have internet access, you could live in a place where the cost of living is quite low and get by with very little for a few years. At least, I think that would be possible, especially if you are young.

Selling people into student loan slavery at criminal interest rates also cripples America itself in huge ways. I feel just about suicidal when I think of mine, and my mother's... Sure, I borrowed 13k for school & went to college with a mix of scholarships & student loans. Congratulations, 20 years later I've never earned a direct dime from my degree & now owe $29k, thanks to the criminal interest rate- Twice the price of my car, and certainly the price of my freedom. It is horrendously gut wrenching in a profound way. Yet we can apparently afford wars of excursion & sending 17k more soldiers into Afghanistan. For what? Disgusting. If you can't meet certain income thresholds for years at a time, how about a little forgiveness? How about capping those criminal interest rates & removing the profit motive?

and you're blaming the credit system for your owing $29,000 due to criminal high rates? ROTFLMAO

depends entirely upon the social focus. When social focus demands education, schools can respond by raising the bar of excellence. Should the focus go soft, the bar of excellence slips to the lowest permissible level, precisely what has been seen to happen since the Reagan administration. Now there are two generations going on three that have not received more than a fraction of the education that was demanded by society in the wake of Sputnik I. Comparing apples and oranges, today's students, although exposed to more information are quantumly less able to critically apply, retain, communicate or understand, not that those "qualities" were missing in the generation that were exposed to the earlier era. By now, those teachers surviving that received their education under excellence are at the point of retiring from the system, those replacing that are subject to recent educational experience do not have the equivalent depth, the consequence is a self-fulfilling negative education spiral headed for the lowest common denominator. Without a working education, maintaining a complex society becomes improbable, and once the earlier generation no longer has a voice and the ability to compare to the earlier conditions, whatever measuring device used will become elastically useless. A Democracy demands a society that has and exercises the same education and abilities as a monarch for governing to work. At this point, the American solution to a problem - throwing money at it - will not work. Echoing all preceding generations, "Youth has gone to the dogs". (smiley)

Disclaimer: the teaching mentors I had were the retiring generation who got their jobs during the depression and had to have great excellence to obtain their positions, so excellence was their standard and they held their students to their standards. Such was the luck of the Sputnik generation, A debt of gratitude is owed the peoples of the USSR at that time for the challenge towards excellence they presented (h/t) the U.S.

Here's a post citing a NYTimes article on the costs and consequences of college educations (via Avedon). Summary -- college tuition has gone up much faster than income and financial aid, and an educational gap with the rest of the world will make the U.S. uncompetitive.