[nickthedart]

Agree with this. With £27k debt for tuition alone, plus other debts for living costs, in a field that changes so fast as Computer Science, you'd be paying off this debt long after much of what you'd have learned would be obsolete. Far better to go straight into work, and study part-time (if employers will take you without a degree that is, which they might if they realise that 18-yr olds can be smart and cheap). It'll be interesting to see what 18-yr olds do in response to these fees. Sadly I fear many may not be clued up at that age, and will study Computer Science then regret later.

[gaius]

Computer Science doesn't change quickly at all. Slightly faster than maths does, perhaps. Only the fashionable language changes quickly.

I think that many people these days don't understand the difference between CS and "making websites with RoR".

[nickthedart]

I agree with that. But, a typical course contains bits that don't change e.g algorithm theory and bits that do , e.g programming skills learned from implementing algorithms, which, back in the day would have been in Pascal or C, nowadays is in Java or Python, and in future maybe some other language. So taking such a course would have 2 aims - get a good grounding in theory, and get some buzzwords on your resume / c.v too . People who don't understand the difference between CS and making RoR websites , sadly include many hiring managers, right? ;)

[arethuza]

I graduated with a CS degree in 1988 - very little of what I learned is obsolete. Of course it was rather theory and maths based... (with a hell of a lot of development, mostly in C on Unix boxes of various breeds).