> I ended up railroaded onto a liberal arts education until I reached my community college, where I encountered people - not just professors - who knew that the magic hardware box could do other things besides send and receive email.

True story: When I was in college, a girl came to me with a question: If she put Borland C++ on her laptop, could she compile programs on it just as easily as on her desktop? I replied that I don't see why not.

Then she asked: "But isn't there a chip in my desktop that does the compiling? Does my laptop have one, too?"

This was a CS major. And an A student. At a technical university.

I feel your pain, man.

And yes, for undergrad education, community or even state college may be more suitable to your interests. A hard-learned lesson for me. The goal of Ivy League undergrad, it seems, is to mold you into a "certain kind of man". "Harvard men", for instance, look and behave a certain way, and know and say the right things. So that when the Harvard men at the helm of power see you, they recognize you as "one of their own" and "good people".

Some of us already have some idea what sort of person we are, and don't want to become anything else. The good news is, we can get all the education we need for pretty cheap, even in the USA. The bad news is, Google is looking for "Stanford men"...

(I should have replied, "Yes, it's called the CPU. And yes, every computer has one.")