I’m torn on CS degrees, because while a vast majority of what makes up the curriculum is made accessible to anyone with access to modern technology, but there are some bits of field that seem to require either a real world scenario or academic setting to learn.
But yeah, I don’t think most degrees don’t provide much value in terms of employment. Even a large chunk of the oh so coveted STEM (notably the S) are probably a crapshoot.
I did Physics and turned out okay (I work in Data Science now) but a lot of that seemed like good fortune.
I think the future for CS education could definitely be online courses - the Nand2Tetris course has stuck with me more than anything I did at University, for example. And Prof. Roughgarden's Algorithms courses were similarly high quality.
Really I think once online courses work out how to solve the credential problem and actually get taken seriously by employers, the college bubble could burst.
One of my personal questions around CS education is topics like HPC.
Lets say I want to learn how to work on HPC problems. There's only really two ways tats going to happen. Working in an industry role on those sort of problems (which won't happen unless you already have that sort of background) or learning in in an academic setting (i.e. a University program)
I don't think self teaching via online courses or otherwise are realistic in this scenario because I as an individual don't have access to either the infrastructure or problem-sets at the sort of scale to work on this thing.
But yeah, I don’t think most degrees don’t provide much value in terms of employment. Even a large chunk of the oh so coveted STEM (notably the S) are probably a crapshoot.