Eh, idk, I'm a pretty good software engineer and I self-taught from the age of eight. I did go to college for software engineering, but if I had a real choice I might not have done it, since I didn't need it - except for the fact that I'm from a third world country and needed to do it for immigration.

I learned about one or two quarters' worth of stuff from academia in my five years there, and it was all towards the end. Even in my internships early in my schooling I was outperforming FTEs.

However, as time goes on and one matures as a person as well as gathers more experience one does become a better software engineer, even if the college professors don't exactly deserve that credit.

So I would say, it's unrealistic to expect to be very good with very little experience, but it is also unrealistic to expect a CS degree to actually have a greater effect than time and practice on someone who had/didn't have an aptitude.