I start at Oxford in October. Part time, Michaelmas term, MSc in Software Engineering. I am paying for it myself through my own company, which is a decent test of whether a person actually believes in a thing.
I do. Here is why.
The teaching is the product
Most universities sell you a campus and a library card. Oxford sells you attention. Small groups, a tutor who has read what you wrote, and an hour where you have to defend it out loud. You cannot hide in a tutorial. Nobody has found a better way to make someone think clearly than making them explain themselves to a person who knows the answer.
That is the whole thing. Everything else is scenery.
You are the least impressive person in the room
Good. That is the point of going.
Thirteen years of building trading interfaces teaches you a lot about trading interfaces. It teaches you almost nothing about the parts of the field you never had to touch. Sitting in a room with people who spent their careers on the parts you skipped is not comfortable. It is just useful.
It survives contact with a real job
The part time route is the underrated one. You go in modules. You keep working. You take what you learned on Friday and put it into production on Monday, and you find out immediately whether it was real.
Theory that has to survive a Monday is better theory.
The name opens doors you cannot open yourself
I would like to say this does not matter. It matters. A degree from Oxford is a line on a page that gets read differently, in every country, by people who will never meet you. That is not fair and it is not a reason to go on its own. It is still true, and pretending otherwise is a strange kind of vanity.
So go
If you can get in, go. If you think you cannot get in, apply anyway, because the people who talk themselves out of it outnumber the people who get rejected by a wide margin. Part time, full time, at twenty two or at forty. Go.
Worst case you spend a few years being pushed by people who are better than you.
There are worse ways to spend a life.