I wholeheartedly agree. I recently finished a 4-year B.A. in History (in Germany, mind you, so my decision wasn't hard on me in a financial way). I didn't doubl

I wholeheartedly agree. I recently finished a 4-year B.A. in History (in Germany, mind you, so my decision wasn't hard on me in a financial way). I didn't double-major in CS or anything, but kept programming and IT stuff as a hobby, contributed to Open Source projects, helped with IT-related problems at university and generally tried to learn something new all the time (The recent surge in online classes like Coursera and Udacity has helped a lot). Now I'm fully employed, directly from University, as a software developer. Is/was my degree useless? No way. Those 4 years of studying history and doing lots of research (I think I wrote around 15 papers in those years, around 70% of which were on subjects with little previous research done before) have taught me to choose my sources wisely, to reflect on my own thinking critically (this is a prime asset as a historian, you cannot uncritically let your own preconceptions of the world direct your decisions) and to generally try to see things (and especially abstractions and thought-systems) from as many different sides as possible. All great skills to have if you code for a living. I might not be as well versed in theoretical computer science as a CS graduate from a good(!) program, but I am familiar enough with the territory that I can pick up new areas/technologies/algorithms rather quickly and it prevents me from getting the "I graduated in CS, I know everything and do not have to make any effort any more"-attitude that I've e.g. seen in my predecessor at the current job I have (he used unsalted md5-hashes for passwords, wrote Java classes that are >10k lines long and used a mix of zip-archives of his Eclipse-workbench and hundreds of commented-out LOCs as a form of version control)