I did a "game design" school when I was younger, but couldn't get a job as a programmer. Worked for a laboratory for a little over a year, and then went back to school to get a software engineering degree. I was 28 when I went into it, worked with "youngsters" of 18 years and older. It was completely fine.

I'm now 50k in debt, but I'm also making twice as much as I did with my minimally paying job at the laboratory. It's going to be a boon in the long run, IMO.

Then, luck should be taken into account. Once you are done with your degree, perhaps the market will have recovered a bit, because I'm hearing a lot of negative feedback lately.

edit: If you're not sure, you can take a peek at this graph of free MIT YouTube courses. Choose something interesting on the right, then figure out where to start on the left to get to your chosen point. Each course can easily take about 100 hours, which sounds a lot, but if you do them you can take that knowledge and more easily extrapolate information in the future.