[timr]

Not to sound too condescending, but part of the goal of higher education is to expose you to things for which you can't see an immediate application. Your perspective is small; your professors' perspective is much larger. They're trying to teach you concepts, not languages.

That's not to say everything that you study will be meaningful and exciting. There's tons of busywork in college (especially in the first few quarters, when they're bringing the slow kids up to speed), but that's life! If you think you're going to escape busywork by starting a company, you're being naive.

More to the point, if the stuff you're studying is so boring and unrewarding that it makes you want to quit, then you've got plenty of time to work on side projects while things get more interesting. That's where the free time comes from!

[Elepsis]

Back when I took my intro to CS class, it was taught in Scheme. I hated this at the time -- and bitched about it constantly. "When am I ever going to need this language that isn't used for anything, and that has such a fucked up syntax))))))?"

Looking back on it now (and having had to implement many of the algorithms we learned about in that class in C, Java and other languages that are less suited for it), I wouldn't have been able to grasp many of the sorting, binary tree or hashing algorithms nearly as easily in another language.

To my own surprise, one of the things that I now consider most valuable about my undergrad degree was that it forced me to at least grasp Scheme and Smalltalk.

[unalone]

Not condescending at all! This is why I love Hacker News: there are so many people worth listening to and they take their time to talk.