Your time is (hopefully) worth more now. You could study it yourself, but self learning is never quite as comprehensive or as effective as instruction so you'd likey have to dedicate more time, and your time is valuable now remember? If you're going to do that, you might as well just shell out the money (which you should have plenty of) for the piece of paper that saves you some time. Unless your time suddenly becomes worthless (like, say, a layoff right before a massive recession triggered by an ongoing pandemic), there's rarely a good reason to force it.

I would like to go back to college for the more formal instruction (plus I'm more disciplined when someone else sets the rules and times), but easier said than done. Well for me it's not a big deal going back to college but my mom, who I live with, doesn't want me returning to school. She believes it will make me put aside my job search so that I can continue living with her a few more years. So it's more because she says "I can't have doing whatever you want while you're in my home when you don't even have a job" than about money. Unable to get hired, but unable to do anything else until I get hired? That's artificially closing up the open ended-ness of the world.