First, yes, if you're the type who wants to start a YC-funded startup... you're going to skip college and do that. That's a small, small percentage of the number of CS grads though - say 1%. 1 in 100 young people interested in Computer Science will found a startup in the United States.

If you think its the "majority" that do that, you have to get out of San Francisco and visit a place like Florida.

But that still leaves 99% who would love to go to college, get a degree, and get a good job doing interesting things. And even if they get a CS degree, they may not even go into programming after college. That happens quite a bit.

I think what this move portends is that Universities can no longer fund research. They get a shrinking amount of money, and they have to focus on teaching.

By the way, the fundamentals of programming do NOT change all that much. You know what Android runs? Java. You know when Java was invented? 1994. Do you know how long it takes to learn Android or iPhone programming if you have a solid understanding of Object Oriented programming? Days. So a 3 year degree in CompSci still has a lot of relevance and value.

Unless your dream is to start a startup, in which case, go do that.

First off, at any decent school the CS curriculum focuses on theory and other things that are relatively slow changing. Big O theory, language parsing, etc are absolutely just as relevant now as they were 10 years ago.

Second, it is asinine to suggest that people with CS degrees don't get interesting jobs. In the end, people with good degrees just have access to a superset of the jobs available to someone who skipped school. Both can be hackers who make cool web apps, or iPhone apps, etc. But only one has the ability to go to Google or Facebook and work with machine learning algorithms. Or go to Apple and work on the iOS platform. Or go to Pixar and build the guts of their rendering engine. That's the value of a degree - there are a lot of really awesome jobs that are very likely out of reach for you having never gone to school for CS.

The big-data space is increasingly important within CS, and I don't see a big move away from academic content there. Whether you learn it in an actual academic program or self-teach, you'll need a solid mathematical background.

[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~crary/819-f09/Landin66.pdf

I'm going to re-phrase what others have already said: You do not understand what "Computer Science" is.

The reason for schools dropping CS is market forces. In the late 90s everyone wanted to do CS because that's where the jobs where, the market crashed and nobody wanted to do CS, then the market picked up and there were no CS grads, so wages went up, so people enrolled, then the market dipped .... Unfortunately there is a 3-4 lag in the system.

Of course if the schools taught CS rather than programming this wouldn't matter as much.

If you really want to get worried, check out how many schools still teach chemistry. Google/Facebook/etc can get by with self-taught programmers. The rest of industry can't get by with self-taught chemists.

The self driving car would do perfectly well built by a group of physics + maths PhDs who were self-taught programmers. We managed to build self-driving flights to the moon that way.

Google and Facebook, between them, employ somewhere in the range of 15,000-20,000 engineers. Look at the entirety of the two companies' web presence (ie their jQuery hacker designed stuff) - that's work that could be done by a very small percentage of those 15,000 people.

The real challenge for both those companies is scalability and algorithmic complexity. They both do things like tweak well-established open source packages, implement machine learning, build programming languages/operating systems, influence technical web standards, etc. Stuff that decidedly is NOT the realm of your average hacker who decided to skip college because the curriculum wasn't "revelant".

If you don't believe me, feel free to try to get hired at either company without a college degree. Unless you've done something VERY notable, it's not gonna happen.

For example I can hack a Bosch Common Rail onto an older diesel engine and build a custom ECU for it. I have no formal experience in EE or Mechanical Engineering but I am confident that I could work on the self driving cars at Google. Would they hire me, no because I don't have a degree in that field, does that mean that I cannot do it, no. I am confident that I could get a job tomorrow with a performance diesel product vendor, that is doing just as complicated development in their niche, should I chose to. Some companies, specifically smaller companies have the time to deeply investigate the candidates, larger companies on the other hand many times have to rely on filters. But don't mistake those filters as an indication of quality or superiority, they are rather administrative processes, nothing more nothing less.

Especially if you go after jobs that actually involve your area of expertise. When a company needs a programmer that's awesome at statistics, they're going to choose the math major that can code over the CS major that can do math, all else being equal...

I would never knowingly ridicule someone who suffered from dyslexia or a similar disability, but I think we have to be careful of becoming so politically correct that we are afraid to criticize or hold anyone accountable for anything.

as opposed to simply being lazy or unprofessional?

I can't begin to help you understand how many times I have been called lazy for not being able to spell, and how frustrating that is. That is the problem, you assume the majority are lazy people that cannot spell and don't want to learn, so you immediately assume someone is in the majority, because well you set up the odds that they are. But if 1 in 10 suffer from it, and the prevalence of people on HN exhibit spelling mistakes at close to the same rate would in not be just as valid to assume that maybe those that do exhibit them, may be in that 1 in 10 population.