Any company worth working for will value material, real-world experience over an academic degree. You'd be much more likely to get a job at that kind of company

Any company worth working for will value material, real-world experience over an academic degree. You'd be much more likely to get a job at that kind of company if you dedicated your 'fifth year' to working on an established open-source project, rather than finishing up a major in CS. After a year of working on an open-source project, you'd have a trail of patches and bug reports demonstrating your programming competence, and hopefully you'd also have established enough rapport with one or two of the project leads to use them as references (and probably also for job leads). If your fifth year at school really is free, and you're enjoying the college experience, then there's no harm in spending another year there. You will learn a few things in your upper-level CS classes that you'll use at some point in your programming career. But there's nothing you can learn in any of your CS classes that you can't learn on your own outside of the classroom. The only real value of a CS education at a brick-and-motor university is a) being immersed in a community of academic pursuit and discourse, and b) the alumni connections. And you don't get much value from those things just by attending classes -- you have to go out and pursue those relationships with your professors, classmates, and alumni.