Well, I can only speak for the ACTC training. Having been unemployed for nearly a year, I really wasn't in a position to pay the obscene fees required for the classes. I'm a member of the Apple Consultants Network, which has a few listservs, and the topic of self-study for the exams came up. The consensus, basically, was that it is indeed possible to do your own study for the exam.
Well, as a newly minted ACTC myself, I can personally confirm that it is indeed possible. For the first exam, you basically will pass it with no problem if you're an OS X power user -- you could know NOTHING about the command line and get high 80% or in the early 90% range. Peruse the study card in the very front of the "Mac OS X Administration Basics Crash Course" book at your local book store; it covers the material on the test beautifully. Or just download Apple's PDF on the topics covered on the exam; it tells you what you need to know also.
Now, the second exam is a little hairier, mainly because it deals specifically with OS X Server (hence the name "OS X Server Essentials," I suppose). I had to install a copy of OSXS that . . . er . . . I "found" somewhere (ahem) onto an external FireWire drive, so that I could try Server Admin, Mac Manager, etc. firsthand. But you could pass the test without even doing that, as long as you study the 150-something-page OSXS manual closely (it's a PDF that can be downloaded freely from Apple's website) and, again, check out the test prep PDF that Apple has, which covers all the topics in the exam.
I didn't find that the OSXS manual alone covered everything on the exam (e.g., subtleties like the difference between OSXS 1.2 and 10.x), but it was enough for me to pass (albeit barely). They don't have an "Exam Cram" book for this exam, and since Coriolis (the publisher) is out of business, I don't think they will, either . . .
Anyway . . . as I said, it can be done, provided you're at least pretty good at studying for stuff without classes.
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