I can't speak for the CS major, since I wasn't one. Instead I decided to do philosophy, which is not something I regret. I still had plenty of time to learn Rai

I can't speak for the CS major, since I wasn't one. Instead I decided to do philosophy, which is not something I regret. I still had plenty of time to learn Rails and work on some cool projects. Since college I've only ever been turned down for one job due to the lack of a CS degree, and it's probably not a job I would have enjoyed much. At my first job, I was the one who was a full-time salaried employee while the intern was the CS grad. Since then I've had the opportunity to work on some amazing projects with some amazing people. I've been a core team member for SproutCore and now for Ember.js and I've gotten to work on some great JS and Rails projects with people like Yehuda Katz and Carl Lerche of Rails Core. I'm not saying that you shouldn't go to college. I'm glad I did (though I wasn't the one paying for it, so I don't have loans). However, I'm also glad I didn't go for CS. Yes, there are some things I did miss out on by not being CS, but instead I got to write code on my own time for my own purposes, not because a class told me what to do. I also got to do a lot of interesting philosophy study that I would not have done on my own time and I'm glad that I had the motivation from school to actually do it. There's no "one size fits all" advice for whether you should go to college or get a CS degree, but in my case, I have no regrets.