My Computer Science Degree Was Not Worth the Cost

The best thing about my college years was learning scientific methodology.<p>The next thing was a very deep dive into computer architecture, starting from flip-flops, to circuits, to microcode, to building operating systems.<p>I may be an outlier, but these two things really shaped my career.

Coincidentally, I went to my first parent &#x2F; teacher conference last night for 10th grade.<p>They offer a class on C++, which was offered way back when I was in high school &#x27;94-98.<p>I couldn&#x27;t help but think what a waste of time that would be. And I get it - their trying to teach logical thinking and problem solving more then starting someone down a career path - but wouldn&#x27;t it make more sense to start these kids on web development or app development - pick a language - java, python, perl - hell - show them some PHP as a gateway drug &#x2F; get Wordpress up and running and customized.<p>Worse is how many students don&#x27;t have a programmer as a parent and wouldn&#x27;t know otherwise? Going to start a kid &#x2F; young adult down a path of C++ and they&#x27;ll build what - video games? Operating systems? Graphic programs?<p>Again - the logical thinking and problem solving this class probably offers is very important in any kind of programming but the class is offered right next to automotive repair &#x2F; body work (which is what he wants to do) which absolutely translates into a career path if the student chooses to go further.<p>I&#x27;m gonna push him in the direction of ECU programming and tuning - best of both worlds - a little programming and he can still work on cars while learning math and science.

Looking at the list of techs, his CS program was an academic CS program with a focus on algorithms- this is all about making more computer scientists, not software engineers. The two fields are somewhat disjoint.