It's happened more than once that I've seen (and had to explain) why putting while loops inside while loops (once saw a one code snippet with 4 nested whiles!) is going to run fine on your dev box with 5 rows in the database but is going to be excruciatingly slow if you move it to production and data starts pouring in.
Granted, in some of the cases the person did have a college degree and should've known how big-Oh applied here but must've been asleep in class.
Technically, no, it wouldn't. Not as you stated it. College being uniquely suitable for learning a subject does not ensure that someone will learn it if they go to college.
You can say that to learn x you must go to college.
If you went to college though the fact that you did or did not learn x says nothing about whether you need to go to college or not to learn it.
You get drilled with exactly this type of logic problem a LOT in discrete math courses. Stuff there's no way the extreme vast majority of working programmers would study on their own just because.
That's being pedantic though, I imagine you're saying that it doesn't matter whether you go to college or not since you can make the same kind of mistakes when you get out. The latter part of which is true. But there's no doubt in my mind that had the guy that did go to college would be a lot worse had he not gone. He'd most probably not be able to write code that worked at all rather than code that works but not as optimally as it could.
