It has always amused me that kids would today pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for something that should cost vastly less, and then cheat to get that piece of vellum. But, as they say: "A Fool and his Money ..."

I didn't have to pay. The State 'retrained' me in some jumped-up school with a few limited degree courses.

I said I did a degree in the end. I should really qualify that. The degree was this bad: I started a five year course to spread out the Math syllabus, so you could accept entrants with a lower grade of maths (i.e. Leaving Cert Pass course vs. Leaving Cert Honours). The L.C. honours Math is time consuming.

But I had to take a year off, because I was minding my wife, who had taken a very severe reaction to steroids. When I came back, the IEEE had jumped on them, removed their accreditation, and truncated the course to 4 years. The guys I started with did a five year accredited course. But the guys I finished with had the last 3 years crammed into 2, = 1.5 years of syllabus each year. Everybody was going so fast they were only hitting the ground in spots. This was particularly true of Math & Control systems. Other sections had their lecture time truncated. 1 year DSP & C Programming were supposed to get a full year each, but they were shortened into 1 semester each.

I learned NOTHING about DSPs, because my lecturer knew nothing about them. The C module was limited to writing silly programs for some unexciting 16 pin PIC microcontroller I'd have demanded my money back - if I had given them any.

We should have been doing FPGAs from year one, with ASICs from year 2. When I got out of College, I would have had difficulty in finding through hole ICs of any sort. I had sold off a better SMT soldering kit in 2006 than the University possessed in 2014!

I didn't have to pay, either. Thanks to a benevolent candy company. (Go buy "Brock's" or "Brach's" candies, please.) But I realize that I was part of the "beta-test program" for the University's first "computer science" degree. No one really knew what such a degree program should consist of, and (in the 1980's) we really didn't have much hardware, anyway. The "personal computer" at that time was a novelty. In our last class before graduation, the department sent us a detailed survey. Then, they sat down in class and talked to us about our experiences in the program.

Importantly: what the candy-company had to pay, for "out-of-state tuition," was $13,000. An "in-state" student could get it for $4,000. A four-year baccalaureate degree. And, today, there is no(!) legitimate reason why it should cost anything more. (The physical plant of a college is identical to that of any public school, and the operational expenses are comparable.)

The degree program really didn't teach me anything [that I didn't already self-know]. But, working with actual students and professors in the "Academic Computing" department definitely did. I learned how to work with and communicate with people about highly technical subjects that I understood and they really didn't – but badly needed to. The experience was tremendously rewarding for me, and I even got cited as a technical resource in several published academic papers.

And, it gave me my very first "real job," working for the University to equip a brand-new academic computer center when IBM unexpectedly won the bid that DEC was supposed to win. I did that job for a couple years before I realized that I had finished it, so I moved on. My mother expected me to pursue a career in "academia," but that was not for me. Instead, I found other "very interesting" things to do, that were also very rewarding.