There are things you know, things you don't know, and things you don't know you don't know.

College is pretty good about the last category, but really if you went through syllabi, scanned through lecture notes, and paged through the reading materials listed, you're probably ahead of most students in that category.

That exercise alone will probably give you a good idea of the technical value of the education.

I would add that words don't have objective complete meanings. Words are indirect references to ideas and ideas are like raw marble in your head, carved into meaningful shapes by working with and manipulating those ideas.

If you bring out a word like "consistency", college is very much about shaping the idea behind that word into increasingly more crisp and formal meanings, especially meanings that can then interact with ideas behind other words like "atomicity" or "scale".

Your answer to 1 troubles me. A CS degree program greatly expands your toolbox BEFORE you need those tools. The problem I have with "when I need to" is how do you know now is the time? It's a chicken-and-egg thing. If an employer hears "I'll go learn that and get back to you" too often, you will not work there for long.

For 2, fair enough. What school will give you a BS degree for <15K?

I think you may be undervaluing effort and payoff of CS fundamentals, as well as overestimating payoff of the paper from an online degree.

(Caveat: If you'll be emigrating in the future a degree can make a difference for visas if recognized )

If you do it and actually apply yourself (as opposed to optimizing for points/effort) I guess you'll be on the up regardless of which (: