Are WEB Design studies in university worth it?

Hi there, since I strongly feel about getting into building websites I`m considering to start university... the thing is however that is serious 4 year commitment and also costs quite a bit of cash.

So here is my question preferably to the ones who has studied web design: does it pay off? Will I really learn so much to justify all that time, money and work? Or maybe I can learn it all from books and courses as well?

Thanks

Not a designer, not a coder, nor have I ever taken a 4 year course in Web Design, so I am probably the worst person to give advice.


Butttttttt the answer is still HELLLL NO you dont need it! You will only learn from actually DOING web design. Learn the basic languages HTML, CSS, PHP from Codecademy. Then go to Elance and make an account doing minor web design work and move your self up from there.

I have graduated from a 4 year Computer Science course.
My academic projects are quite decent (some might say impressive but I've seen better).

A NES emulator.
A LOLCode language compiler in my class where we learned grammar, state machines/automata etc.
A full "movie site", with ability to make easy front page news, add polls, and its own forum with moderation system (this was back before CMS/Wordpress/blog engines existed, and also before "easyinstall" forums like vBulletin).
etc.

I can say that professors cannot teach you that knowledge, and everything I needed to learn to make those, I learned it on my own. I know plenty of people who graduated but cannot code their a.ss out of a box. They just studied books to pass exams, and ended up in non IT jobs.

You'd learn more from the HTML/JS/CSS/PHP tutorials from Tizag.

Just download XAMPP, make some sample projects from the tutorials there (a guestbook, simple website from scratch, stuff like that), and you'll have enough knowledge to open up and customize "packages" like WordPress and vBulletin, write your own referrer blankers, make your own simple content locker, etc

Stuff a lot of my classmates still can't do despite supposedly "programming" for 4+ years.
Professors really need to stop passing people who can only write code that barely compiles or works. But then, I've ALSO seen professors who can't code their way out of a box. Probably those kinds of people I had as classmates managing to get a teaching post.

Answers seems to be pretty one sided. Thanks a lot hesallin, AntonyDG and bundat for your input, I appreciate it a lot