The computer science degree isn’t dead

The strongest reaction was that the article undersells what the degree is really buying. People kept coming back to the same point: the credential matters, but the bigger prize is the network, the social sorting, and the institutional trust that come with college. Several self-taught or nontraditional engineers said they built solid careers anyway, sometimes lucrative ones, but at much higher cost in time, instability, and missed access to elite hiring tracks. In that framing, college is less about proving you can code and more about getting vouched for by a system that large companies and high-status circles already trust. There was also a useful correction to the scary unemployment comparison in the piece. Recent CS grads do show higher unemployment than philosophy or art history majors in New York Fed data, but commenters pointed out that CS and computer engineering still have much lower underemployment and the highest early-career wages. The cleaner reading is not that CS stopped paying off. It is that many CS graduates are holding out for software jobs, while humanities grads more readily take any decent job. On the technical side, people did not buy the idea that software fundamentals are suddenly irrelevant. If anything, they argued the opposite. AI may make coding output cheaper, but it raises the premium on people who can reason about systems, debug reality, judge bad output, and learn from research. That fed into a broader complaint that companies have broken the old bargain around junior hiring. A degree was never supposed to make someone productive on day one. It was supposed to pair with mentoring and gradual responsibility. Firms now want juniors who already have production instincts, shipped products, and business sense, then act surprised that the pipeline is collapsing. A second anxiety ran underneath all this: even if CS remains a good degree, the degree itself may be getting noisier. A few commenters working around universities said cheating with LLMs is making take-home work and lightly proctored assessment less trustworthy, which could degrade the signal employers rely on. That concern sharpened the emphasis on school quality, internships, and evidence of real-world work. By the end, the practical consensus was clear. The CS degree is not dead. It is still one of the best mainstream credentials for strong earnings and relevant employment. But its value now depends more on where you get it, who you meet there, and whether you can pair it with proof that you can operate beyond classroom assignments.