Understanding the material from the lower level courses in whatever university you attend in an afternoon is not even remotely comparable to picking up any of those topics fully in an afternoon.  Are you under the impression that after you&#x27;ve been through your 200-level algorithms course you&#x27;ve now exhausted the topic and have nothing left to learn?<p>If you haven&#x27;t even taken 300 and 400 level courses, how would you know whether &quot;the university environment... is adverse to the development of good CS knowledge&quot;?  If that&#x27;s the case, you should probably drop out of school and save some money.  Just start submitting some research papers now!  Your lack of a PhD won&#x27;t matter once you&#x27;ve shown everyone how fully you know each topic.