Since I got my degree in Germany, things are slightly different, but it seems to me like the premises of the situation are very similar. During and after high-s

Since I got my degree in Germany, things are slightly different, but it seems to me like the premises of the situation are very similar. During and after high-school I worked as a web dev for a small compnay and did some projects on the side. At the time the only college degree you could go for was a "Diplom", which is a 5 year program and qualifies you for PhD studies - or just keep working and making very good money at the time. After having done web development - I'm talking front-end stuff here: HTML, JavaScript, CSS and simple business logic stuff with ColdFusion/Perl/PHP and MySQL - I wanted to move on to more interesting things. And that's what the degree allowed me to do. I qualified the kind of web development I did, because there are some very interesting fields on the server side when it comes to scaling things, but I can see how the front-end technologies get boring. It certainly depends on what courses you are going to take. But if your aim is to get a deeper understanding of more complex problems, I suggest you go for it and apply that rule to the courses you are going to take. Personally I did mainly machine learning and compilers and worked at the chair for distributed systems. So what has this gotten me? Well, that depends on the way you look at it, but together with my co-founder I'm working on a startup that analyzes location information and motion detection to track user behavior. It's interesting, technically challenging, not a lot of other folks work in this area and we might even make money with it ;)