I got into web dev before web dev degrees existed also. at the time a strong portfolio was certainly more than enough. however, I'm talking about a time where

I got into web dev before web dev degrees existed also. at the time a strong portfolio was certainly more than enough. however, I'm talking about a time where they would hire anybody who knew a smidgen of HTML. and I wasn't straight out of high school. I had spent some time in the world of work first, proving that I could meet deadlines and handle responsibilities as a production artist and graphic designer. and for that matter, I went to a high school which got profiled on CNN as "the Harvard of high schools." I was studying both Ancient Greek and Latin at the age of 15 or 16. so, although I did it without a degree, and I've met plenty of great programmers without degrees, or whose degrees are in linguistics or philosophy or film, I would have to say, the responsible thing to tell a high school kid is that a degree is pretty damn useful. also, web dev has picked up a staggering amount of complexity in the intervening decades. think of all the perspective you would gain if you were to fully investigate, for example, the convoluted history of MVC - from the GUI, to Rails, and then back to the GUI via the browser, where we now have to host a kind of recursive MVC. or imagine having to make sense of JavaScript without knowing that the "Java" in the name was a marketing gimmick from 1997. yet at the same time, most CS degrees appear to suck anyway, and many CS degrees probably even do severe and active harm, insofar as they encourage the bizarre anti-intellectualism prevalent in STEM culture. you're more likely to avoid an unthinking contempt for English majors, for example, if you never had to find out what a major was in the first place. so, like anything in tech, there's tradeoffs.