There’s a lot of debate about formal education (post-secondary education) versus self-education, and I understand why because there are a lot of pros and cons to compare.

On the side of formal education, some of the pros are: you have teachers with (presumably) industry experience and connections sharing all their knowledge with you. Your program is designed to teach you a broad spectrum of things you’ll need to know professionally and creatively. Your classmates will eventually become your professional peers, meaning your first network connections are built in. And the formal structure of school keeps you accountable and progressing.

However on the negative side: university and college are expensive and school debt can burden you for a long time afterward. Not all programs are equal and it’s hard to tell if a curriculums is good or not from the outside. And it’s a huge time commitment, which can be hard for people who can’t afford to centre their lives around their studies, like parents, or people who need to work to support themselves or others.

Those negatives for formal education, on the flip side, are kind of the pros of self-education: you can spend as much or as little money as you want, by watching free tutorials on youtube, to paying for something like SkillShare - way cheaper than annual tuition. You can focus on learning what you want, rather than enduring classes that might be poorly planned or poorly taught in a larger curriculum. You can find online teachers and resources that cater specifically to your preferred learning style. And you can fit all this into whatever schedule you need, and work it around other school, work, or family obligations.

However, I think the negatives of self-education outweigh the pros: choosing what to learn online means you can be completely oblivious to information you need - you don’t know what you don’t know. Not having a planned schedule can mean you can learn very slowly, forget information over time, and the overall process can take forever - there’s also no way to know when you’ve learned “enough”. I see lots of people completely on the hard technical skills (like software tutorials) and not learn about conceptual thinking, semiotics, visual problem solving, design history, or typography history. And there’s nobody but yourself to hold you accountable or push you creatively.

Here’s the final thing to consider though: how much you already know. You’ve been working for five years, and you say you don’t think your portfolio has improved at all. I can’t say either way without seeing it, but I would wager you know more now than you did before you started your job five years ago. Remember that your old portfolio presumably got you hired in the first place; there must’ve been something in there your managers liked.

You say you don’t like the work you did; was it truly bad design, or was it work you didn’t personally like or want to do more of? If you can do a good job designing something boring, like a price tag, web banner, print flyer, as long as it functions and communicates the way it needs to, then that’s probably good design.

Reach out to your network and see if anybody will meet with you for a portfolio review in exchange for a coffee or something, and get an objective opinion. It can be really hard to measure our own abilities, especially if we haven’t been happy at work for other reasons. Try to meet a few different people, because each will have different opinions; anything that gets repeated, you need to work on.

You might find a solution in between the two options: sign up for individual classes, workshops, or online courses to hone your skills in the areas you feel weakest. Just going over the information in a class and seeing how much of it you’re already familiar with, might give you a better sense of where you stand. And if you realize you’ve underestimated yourself, you’re not out too much money.

If going to school is going to give you the confidence you need to succeed in your career, then that’s as good a reason as any to go. Worst case scenario, you learn the same thing twice. Just keep in mind that at that point, you're paying tuition for peace of mind as much as for an education - only you can decide how much that’s worth.