It really depends on your work ethic and mentality towards doing extra work. In order to become fully prepared after college, you need to have a) a deep passion

It really depends on your work ethic and mentality towards doing extra work. In order to become fully prepared after college, you need to have a) a deep passion for programming (i.e. personal programming projects), b) great work ethic to continually learn new things (i.e. tools, languages, etc), and c) the ability to search out fellow programmers and get help. If you're confident in the things I've mentioned before, then regardless of what degree you graduate with you'll be fine. However, if you're not sure which industry you want to work in, not mature enough to learn and program on your own, or even if you're unsure about whether you can handle the class workload, I say bite the bullet and take the 5th year. I graduated class of 2010 after 5 years, and I have to say that if it wasn't for that extra 5th year I wouldn't have matured enough and been prepared mentally or emotionally for those job interviews and the working lifestyle after college. Additionally, all the classes definitely provide some value to you, even though it's not obvious at first. For example, I took a compiler class in my 5th year because I was interested in how a language is constructed and then broken down into low level code. Although I never work on low level programming (I do server engineering with Ruby on Rails), the exposure of compilers and language grammar helped me understand how Ruby conceptually differs from other languages and why Ruby is better (or worse) than other languages in certain situations. So in conclusion, if you're determined and know where you want to be 3 years from now, don't worry about whether you graduate in 4 years or not. However, if you're unsure about the things mentioned above, consider the 5th year without worrying yourself about the money. As a programmer, you'll do just fine financially.