I've been writing code since I was 12, and I'm 57 now. I majored in Computer Information Systems back in the 1980s. Honestly, I got a lot more out of the other aspects of going to college than I did from the coursework related to my major.
There's some important development that happens at traditional college student age. Some of that can be fostered by attending college. Some of it happens organically no matter where you are.
Your son seems atypical: he knows what he wants to do, he has solid skills, and he is probably already better self-educated than the typical graduating college senior would be in software development.
So at this point what he needs is not necessarily the education, but the magic piece of paper -- the diploma -- that makes him hirable in more places.
A business degree with a minor in a development-oriented course of study might serve him better than spending $160K on what essentially would be a mix of formalizing his learning / reviewing what he already knows.
Because, after all, isn't the point of an education to learn something you don't know already?
So back to that important development: your son needs to become more well rounded. He seems to have excellent aptitude for programming and data processing. How are his social skills? What is the status of his business acumen? Does he aspire to work for himself or start a company someday? To what is he going to apply those skills he's got?
The answer to that is what he should go to college to learn. A generalist degree in something like business might serve him very well. Wasting four years of his life and $160K on stuff he already knows probably won't do much except help him refine his skills in beer and girls. Not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, but maybe not six figures worth of value, either.
I would encourage him to either go to school and round out his learning, or just jump into the working world and find where his skills are deficient and let that inform a future college decision. Just my $.50
You can do it on the cheap with CCRs and estate sales. My Kenwood HF unit was bought for $250, I made wire dipole antennas. I'm surrounded by Baofeng equipment as I type this. Total outlay for all of it probably on the order of $1000.
Not in the USA. We still have 50,000 watt clear channel stations. On a clear winter night, local lore has it that WJR-760AM Detroit could be heard in Mexico. Crystal radios still work...well, not fine, but as good as they ever did. AM frequencies are low enough they skip off the ionosphere.
My take: the people voting for right wing candidates don't believe in "redistribution" which IMO is not a proper function of government. The left really wants to take the nation's wealth and give it to people it deems to be deserving of it; the people voting for the right wing disagree wholeheartedly. As do I. Get your hands out of our pockets.
I spent 15 years with HP in their services division. I liked the work I was doing, even though I was slightly underpaid for it. I would have stayed there but they cut me loose back in 2014 with 50K other employees. They did give me a decent severance package (3 months pay with health insurance) but it was shocking how easily they just cut me loose after years of dedicated service. In the end they did me a favor; I've spent the subsequent 10 years doing interesting stuff for four different companies in that time. I'm in my mid 50s now and thinking about optimizing for a decent retirement sometime in the next 10 years. I don't know if I'll be forced to change jobs again or not.
Yes I regret being with HP for 15 years; I had a lot to learn to be marketable again after being there for that length of time. But since I'm working toward retirement now, I will probably try to stay as long as I can where I am.
I switched from Gmail to Proton last December ('23). So far it has worked okay, but there are some complaints.
First, the Android app is simply not as good as Gmail's. It doesn't allow a read message/delete it/move to the next message. This interrupts my workflow as I deal with large amounts of mail.
Second, I'm frequently running ProtonMail via web on two separate PCs. The two seem to get out of sync. If I bulk delete emails from my inbox on one machine, the other machine sometimes doesn't reflect this. Sometimes the emails reappear on the machine I used to delete them.
There have also been edge cases where I have lost an email I was composing on the PC under circumstances I've had a hard time narrowing down. When it happens it's incredibly frustrating, and there are no remnants saved as a draft. I wish I could tell you how to reproduce it for certain. It is usually happening in a dual-machines running scenario.
All in all the solution overall lacks the polish that Gmail has. I wish it wasn't so.
There's some important development that happens at traditional college student age. Some of that can be fostered by attending college. Some of it happens organically no matter where you are.
Your son seems atypical: he knows what he wants to do, he has solid skills, and he is probably already better self-educated than the typical graduating college senior would be in software development.
So at this point what he needs is not necessarily the education, but the magic piece of paper -- the diploma -- that makes him hirable in more places.
A business degree with a minor in a development-oriented course of study might serve him better than spending $160K on what essentially would be a mix of formalizing his learning / reviewing what he already knows.
Because, after all, isn't the point of an education to learn something you don't know already?
So back to that important development: your son needs to become more well rounded. He seems to have excellent aptitude for programming and data processing. How are his social skills? What is the status of his business acumen? Does he aspire to work for himself or start a company someday? To what is he going to apply those skills he's got?
The answer to that is what he should go to college to learn. A generalist degree in something like business might serve him very well. Wasting four years of his life and $160K on stuff he already knows probably won't do much except help him refine his skills in beer and girls. Not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, but maybe not six figures worth of value, either.
I would encourage him to either go to school and round out his learning, or just jump into the working world and find where his skills are deficient and let that inform a future college decision. Just my $.50