I would say that if you have the opportunity to go to a good school, go. Maybe you're a programming prodigy, maybe you aren't -- right now, you're the only one that's convinced of it (even as you acknowledge your known shortcomings, if you think that you might be better off without university, you're already considering yourself as one among a rarified breed). But, a degree from a good school and the work to show for it has a tendency to convince nearly everyone with hardly an argument about it. There's also the matter that most young people who might be quite accomplished in a narrow field don't actually know enough about the broader field to even be aware of what else is important to know. Left to your own devices, would you slog through set theory? Category theory? Discrete math?
I was probably 11 or 12 when I started writing little programs of my own. I had read about programming and modified code from the backs of books before that. By the time I graduated high school I had written a couple small games, 3 graphics programs, a map editor, and a number of other small tools and utilities, some in C, others in QuickBasic. I did pretty much coast through my first year in college getting good grades, but sometime during the second year I began falling behind -- probably less due to any kind of lack of intellect, and more due to poor study and work habits, and to a general sense that I would be able to complete programming assignments and other work faster than I actually could. This had a cumulative effect, and I even failed a number of courses before getting myself back on track. This cost me a lot of time, and a lot of extra tuition, too. We have a lot of things going for us at the age when we graduate school -- our youth, our health, our positive outlook -- but we also tend to have a lot of hubris, and a stunning lack of ability to clearly see much more than 6 months into our own future.
Another way to think of it is this: whatever level you're at now, your contemporaries who go to university will probably have caught up or surpassed you in the 3-4 years it takes them to graduate. If you're able to skip university and enter the workforce now as some kind of developer, you'll compete with people fresh out of university, likely every bit as competent as you, but with a degree to show for it and 4 years wiser. If you are able to land a job, you'll likely do so at extreme entry-level, and it's probably going to take 2-4 years before you convince people that you do, in fact, know what you're doing despite the lack of any kind of degree. In your work, you'll likely spend those years focused on a fairly narrow niche, and while you may end up very proficient in that niche, your proficiencies in other areas will not be nearly as developed. This is not an uncommon experience, I know a very brilliant guy who's been at Google for 5 years now -- he's payed incredibly well, he gets great reviews, and when he says something, people at work listen. He's also a little worried that he's so focused on the task of making other people's code scale up, that's his ability to write his own code from the ground up is starting to decline. When you start working, you generally start getting pushed into one pigeon-hole or the other, for better or worse.
The point I'm making here is that its easy to see going straight into the work-force as "Proceed directly to Go, Collect $200." But if we're talking strictly about your professional life, its not about who can run the first 400 meters most quickly, but about who can cover the most ground before they run out of gas. Having a shortcut right out of the gate is a leg up, but others will come on quickly. If you intend to keep ahead of them, then you need to develop the legs for it. Very few places do that better than a quality university.
