The author's attitude toward CS degrees stems from an insidious issue affecting higher education in America (and that, in my opinion, will eventually be its downfall). College is not where you go to learn something. That's what trade schools are for (at least traditionally).<p>College is where you go to learn how to learn.<p>Not everyone wants to learn how to learn. Not everyone needs to learn how to learn. There are a great many professions where one simply needs to be trained, and then set loose in the "real world".<p>Programming is not one of those professions.<p>So as colleges have shifted toward satisfying the masses, the majority of whom fall into the category of not wanting or not being interested in learning how to learn, they are increasingly failing those who need such skills.
<i>This is why I don't believe in computer science degrees. What you learned 5 years ago may not be relevant today.</i><p>If the things one learns in a CS program are irrelevant 5 years later, that's a pretty crappy CS program.<p>I don't worry about my CS knowledge becoming irrelevant any more than I worry about calculus or differential equations becoming irrelevant.
> This is why I don't believe in computer science degrees.<p>Computer science degrees aren't about learning a computer language; they're a ramp to learning about and practicing programming.
FTA:<p>> This is why I don't believe in computer science degrees. What you learned 5 years ago may not be relevant today.<p>CS degrees aren't about what you learned, but what concepts your mind digested and grew from.
This is spoken like someone that doesn't know computer science at all. So, knowing computer science means you understand the fundamentals of programming and abstraction for computational purposes and this person is saying "screw that. what you should really care about is what a 'while' loop looks like not just in your programming language of choice but only the latest version of your programming language of choice.' Very naive.