I can say that Self Education is the Modern way of learning, with the technology we have presently there is no need to run behind any institutions or Universities for education. A person can sit at any part of the world and learn by himself using the Internet..
Totally agree. These days you can study anything for free. Just go to a portal like coursera or openuniversity and you can search courses.
Not long ago I watched 98% of the lectures of one by Yale University, it was priceless, and it was free.
The best part of it, if you studied it formally (I mean taking notes, rote learning the subject and such, something I didn't do) you could go through a test and if you passed it, they gave you a certificate. It costed 50 dollars, but had no academic credit.