I found Deschooling Society book on my dad's bookshelf about 9 years ago. No idea why he had it. I quit university about 3/4 way through reading it. I'm poorly adapted to the cadence and mechanisms of institutional education and this guy provided an alternative that I have employed since to an effect further than I had imagined was possible.
Anecdotally speaking, the deeply ingrained cultural view around me is that education is attained through educational institutions. One of Illich's core arguments against traditional schooling is that in fact the mechanisms of school are not the major contributor to one's aptitudes. When I traced my most promising or useful aptitudes, I agreed that school was not where these were developed. Having one dissenting and well-reasoned voice was important in being able to follow through with experimenting with a self-driven educational model.
Illich demonstrates real examples in learning Spanish through a dominant institutional approach versus intensive, ad-hoc immersive study groups to claim a growing disconnect between method & goal as well as agency problems arising in institutional education (credentialism, self-justification etc). For me, replacing the learning confirmation and feedback tools with a real-world cause/effect, market-driven approach (job interviews, low stakes freelancing, hobby projects) well aligned my intrinsic motivation with my educational goals.
Retrospectively, an institutional computer-science education would have had its advantages, though I don't think I was ready for it. I do think our dominant educational approaches are very far from optimal for a big subset of students, we haven't ventured far enough into experimenting with alternatives and from a macro lens, I definitely sympathise with the idea that broadly speaking, it begins to look like a grift designed to continue & justify its own existence.
practically: minimised expenses, quit job & university, went to coding meetups in my city 1-2x a week, signed up to a couple mentorship programs as a mentee, read through and completed exercises in books on web fundamentals (via codeacademy, pluralsight etc - microsoft used to give free memberships), C ("the c book"), JS (ydkjs, eloquentjs), Go (straight to the docs), posted all exercises and projects to github, built and deployed an application for a not for profit, took on average ~15hrs freelance work a week, reviewed job boards, requested feedback from recruiters and interviewers and used it to adapt syllabus.
