The limited value of a computer science education

Sure, most computer scientists become programmers, and CS degrees don't necessarily translate into programming skills. However, getting a "computer science" degree is not the same as getting a "programming" degree and I don't think that its "usefulness" should be determined by the skill someone has as a programmer after getting the degree.

The reason getting a CS degree does not make someone a good programmer is simple: * A large percentage of the courses you will take will be general education (about 20% in my colleges case) * Another large chunk will be in mathematics (say another 20%) * One more sizable chunk will be "lost" to CS theory and "row-based" information (remember writing round-robin schedules by hand, or verbally explaining parts of TCP in class)?

Leaving us with maybe 40% of classes having some sort of programming lab. And if your like me you'll specialize in machine learning, will will allow for even less exposure to things like the gang of 4 patterns.

However, the flexibility of a CS education is much much greater than if I had just been programming for those 4 years. If I decide I'm more interested in a career in IT security or data science, my courses will have useful. I think that someone who had instead just been programming Java and Rails web apps for 4 years (like I do now) would have a much harder time transitioning into those (potentially higher paying) fields as the market evolves.

Also it's important not to discredit general education. Being a strong writer, speaker will always help you. Knowing some history and geography will keep you from sounding like an idiot when you talk to people from other countries.

A college education is not the same thing as a trade school and shouldn't be compared to one.

Maybe what we actually need is a separate field, e.g. "practical computing". - which, I accept, would lend itself less well to University education which we have come to expect as a prerequisite for better paying jobs.

Up until recently, the vast majority of Computer Science programs were under the Mathematics department. For most colleges even to this day they are still under the Electrical Engineering department.

The problem is that there is no good formalized educational standard for software development training. So instead Computer Science gets shoehorned in as a substitute. This leads both to sub-standard Computer Science degree programs from a pure CS perspective (because they are primarily just trade school educations in disguise) which are even worse as regards to training for Software Engineering. CS is very algorithm and data structure focused, which is good in moderation for dev training, but they usually delve into realms that are not useful even in the "well it's good to have a broad knowledge base" sense. Moreover, CS doesn't typically touch at all on the many practical skills, and their fundamentals, needed to be a good dev, ranging from development cycles and styles to QA and testing fundamentals to source control use and management to proper composition and componentization of software to refactoring and dealing with legacy code to deployment strategies and techniques and then on to familiarity with actual operational systems related to all of these things. Each of those topics has sufficient depth to be an entire course or series of courses, yet they are frequently only barely touched on in CS programs, and sometimes they are ignored entirely.

I've been in hiring loops numerous times, and one of the quickest things I learned about hiring in tech is that a CS degree on a resume means basically nothing, there is almost no correlation between having studied CS in college and being able to code at even the most basic level. Unfortunately, I don't foresee much change in the future on this problem. CS is still a prestige degree (a 4-year degree in one of the coveted STEM fields) and I have a hard time seeing a legitimate Software Development education fitting in the mold of either an arts or sciences degree program at a liberal arts college.