| I've been writing code since I was 12, and I'm 57 now. I majored in Computer Information Systems back in the 1980s. Honestly, I got a lot more out of the other aspects of going to college than I did from the coursework related to my major. There's some important development that happens at traditional college student age. Some of that can be fostered by attending college. Some of it happens organically no matter where you are. Your son seems atypical: he knows what he wants to do, he has solid skills, and he is probably already better self-educated than the typical graduating college senior would be in software development. So at this point what he needs is not necessarily the education, but the magic piece of paper -- the diploma -- that makes him hirable in more places. A business degree with a minor in a development-oriented course of study might serve him better than spending $160K on what essentially would be a mix of formalizing his learning / reviewing what he already knows. Because, after all, isn't the point of an education to learn something you don't know already? So back to that important development: your son needs to become more well rounded. He seems to have excellent aptitude for programming and data processing. How are his social skills? What is the status of his business acumen? Does he aspire to work for himself or start a company someday? To what is he going to apply those skills he's got? The answer to that is what he should go to college to learn. A generalist degree in something like business might serve him very well. Wasting four years of his life and $160K on stuff he already knows probably won't do much except help him refine his skills in beer and girls. Not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, but maybe not six figures worth of value, either. I would encourage him to either go to school and round out his learning, or just jump into the working world and find where his skills are deficient and let that inform a future college decision. Just my $.50 |