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[Aquin]

At least at UBC, we didn't spend much time learning to program.  Only a handful of courses dealt with the basics of several languages and rarely did we dig deep into it.  But you learn a lot in CS that helps you program without teaching you a specific language. 

Once you get it all down, picking up new languages and concepts becomes rather easy.  I've certainly learned a lot outside of school since then, but there's no way I would have been able to do it so easily without that background.

[ChevyRay]

In response to that, I've just been teaching myself coding, and it's going rather successfully. I have no doubts at all now that I'd be able to learn any coding language at my own pace if I wanted to, and the college option is still open for something more interesting, maybe something that I couldn't learn as easily on my own, such as art, etc.

You learn a lot more on a CS degree then just how to program.

Most certainly. I would never deny such a claim.

[Aquin]

Not only that, you don't really learn how to program until you get OUT of CS.  I've learned way more techniques and useful algorithms since UBC.  Of course, as I said before, without the CS background I don't think I would have been successful.

[Sar]

My first programming course in college taught less than what I was able to learn in 1 week when i was in 8th grade.

This. Why even both wasting college on CS when you can use it to learn something fun, like EE and just make video games in your spare time? I might be biased, though.

I know others have said similar things already, but in my experience, I got a lot out of a CS degree (Warwick, UK, 99-02) and very little was directly related to any of the programming they taught me. The most useful course to me was Functional Programming, in which we were taught the theory and practice of SML (which I gather from Haskell geeks I've known isn't even a very good example of a functional language). Have I used SML or any other functional language after that course ended? Not at all. But it made me think about programming in a completely different way to the way I'd been working in Delphi and Java before that, and the things I learned doing that were also applicable to the way I code in OO imperative languages, and I'm absolutely certain that I'm a better programmer as a result of taking that course. (If any of you guys are at Warwick DCS these days, Tell Steve Matthews that leather-jacket said hi. ;-)

I think the only actual programming-related things I really learned at university were to do with multithreaded theory and application in a pair of concurrency courses in the second year, but there were several cases like Functional Programming where I've learned a new way of thinking about things, of approaching problems and so on which have been very useful since, both in professional non-games-related land and also hobby game projects.




Oh, and also there was beer.




(And while I've never tried to get into the gaming industry myself, the interviews I've seen asking about recruitment have always been filled with guys saying "we prefer people to have proper CS degrees than any of these game-related courses, generally they're taught by people who don't have a clue what we want in the industry". But the other thing to bear in mind, which I don't think I've seen anyone mention yet, is that five years is a long time - the answer may well be different by then, as game-related degree courses are pretty new in the grand scheme of things.)