Two answers, sorta: You should play to your strengths/interests. Staying up to date in the tech world requires a bit of passion, so choose a path that you'll

Two answers, sorta: You should play to your strengths/interests. Staying up to date in the tech world requires a bit of passion, so choose a path that you'll enjoy over one that makes the most sense. If you have a design eye and prefer building interfaces a CS degree might not help you much. If you like hard core problem solving that requires heavy analysis, CS might be more suitable. Secondly, I don't think that a CS degree will 'pay off' in HTML5 and CSS3 skills as much as it will pay off with language and knowledge around how the nuts and bolts of programming works. My experience as a non CS major is that a CS degree isn't really required for a lot of things in the tech world. There will be some problems that will be terribly difficult and confusing if you don't have the depth of education that a CS degree would provide. I accept that as a weakness and try to work around it and to keep learning.