I am surprised that you would not be well-served by a math degree from a half-decent institution, and very skeptical that your degree has not actually helped yo

I am surprised that you would not be well-served by a math degree from a half-decent institution, and very skeptical that your degree has not actually helped you obtain your career, versus not having any baccalaureate degree at all. I've worked with software engineers senior to myself who had B.A.s or Ph.D.'s in math and no degrees with the letters C and S in them, including a few younger, fairly recent graduates. I do have the magical letters "CS" in my degree, but I also have a second major in mathematics. While I must confess I hardly use a fraction of the math I studied on a daily basis and have forgotten most of it, it has served me well and there have been numerous times I would have been lost without it. Pardon, but you seem a little bitter. I suspect you have no idea how good you have it, compared to say, most graduates with a degree in humanities from an expensive liberal arts college. All that being said, if your intended career path is software engineering, I would tend to agree that studying software engineering is the best education to prepare for it.