YMM, of course, V, but I've used almost everything I ran into in my collegiate CS-related courses in some form or another. And I find that the stuff that I haven't directly used has contributed to my ability to solve problems--having the prerequisites to be able to assimilate into my corpus of knowledge pretty random stuff has served me extremely well. Much more importantly to me, however, I was exposed to things outside of "that computer stuff" that have made me better at being a manager, a leader, and (as hokey as it sounds) a human being. I literally can't put a price tag on it, but I would be vastly poorer as a person without a liberal education that I think gets aggressively discounted when attempting to view college in purely transactional terms. It is a much greater criticism of college, to me, that a student has to go looking for this stuff; the existence of bachelor's degrees that are functionally trade-school materials is troubling to me. I deal with a lot of technical people who are pretty aggressively ignorant of things that don't involve keyboards or oscilloscopes, and I think that is the greater failure of the American collegiate system.
Don't get me wrong--I'm self-taught too, I'd been writing code for a decade-ish before I went to college, but this stuff changed my life profoundly, and I think minimizing it out of hand is downright tragic. Maybe if there was a better way to get people to acquire this a few years on (calling to mind the idea that people should have a few years of experience before getting an MBA), but there isn't right now.
As far as paying a premium goes--I graduated with about $20K of debt, mostly because it was effectively free money (my total interest payments before I paid them off were less than $2K), and was getting paid through school (did Google Summer of Code twice, ran my own web dev shop, etc.). Bad choices can be made with regards to college, but that's a criticism of overly expensive (private) colleges.
Don't get me wrong--I'm self-taught too, I'd been writing code for a decade-ish before I went to college, but this stuff changed my life profoundly, and I think minimizing it out of hand is downright tragic. Maybe if there was a better way to get people to acquire this a few years on (calling to mind the idea that people should have a few years of experience before getting an MBA), but there isn't right now.
As far as paying a premium goes--I graduated with about $20K of debt, mostly because it was effectively free money (my total interest payments before I paid them off were less than $2K), and was getting paid through school (did Google Summer of Code twice, ran my own web dev shop, etc.). Bad choices can be made with regards to college, but that's a criticism of overly expensive (private) colleges.