[seiji]

It's been a while since I've debunked the bunk of an education post. I hope I'm not too rusty. (The formatting is horrible and I apologize. I can't decide between italics for quoting the parent or fixed width indents. Right now the fixed width indents are the parent being quoted.)

  First of all, I'd say a pretty good proportion of the best programmers I know were self taught

I've noticed people tend to self-select talent. People who go to MIT think MIT churns out the best programmers in the world. People who went to community college think community colleges turn out the best programmers in the world. I'm curious now -- did you go to university?

  there are growing opportunities to learn code online.

Hm. I thought we were talking about universities and cs, not programming.

  CS curricula are out of date and almost always have been

Out of date depends on your mindset and the circumstances. Are they teaching using pascal and visual delphi in 2012? Yes, that's behind the times. Are they teaching you scheme, smalltalk, and C instead of Python, Objective-C, or Ruby? That's not behind the times, it's historical immersion. You have to know where you come from to know where you are going.

  with respect to what employers are looking for

bzzt You just lost the "why go to college" argument. Thanks for playing.

  nobody is being denied the opportunity to learn coding.

Imagine I recalled that old quote about astronomy and telescopes here.

  really want to learn actual academic CS instead of just getting employable skills. I seriously doubt that though.

Ah ha! Now we are back to my first question -- did you go to university?

[tryitnow]

Yes, I went to university and I actually believe in the value of education. I have the student loans from my MBA to remind me of that.

But what works for me won't work for everyone.

However, you're point about selection bias is a good one, it's just not applicable in terms of educational experience in my case, but in my case it is applicable in terms of geography - I live and work in the SF Bay Area, so educational credentials are just not valued as much here).

But I would contend that the rest of the world might learn a thing or two from the SV model of focusing ruthlessly on results and not pieces of paper.