I got an Electronics Engineering Degree almost 30 years ago (and, funnilly enough, I then made my career as a software engineer and I barelly used the EE stuff professionally except when I was working in high-performance computing, but that’s a side note) and back then one of my software development teachers told us “Every 5 years half of what you know becomes worthless”.
All these years later, from my experience he was maybe being a little optimist.
Programming is something you can learn by yourself (by the time I went to Uni I was already coding stuff in Assembly purelly for fun and whilst EE did have programming classes they added to maybe 5% of the whole thing, though nowadays with embedded systems its probably more), but the most important things that Uni taught me were the foundational knowledge (maths, principles of engineering, principles of design) and how to learn, and those have served me well to keep up with the whole loss of relevance of half I know every 5 years, sometimes in unexpect ways like how obscure details of microprocessor design I learned there being usefull when designing high performance systems, the rationalle for past designs speeding up my learning of new things purelly because why stuff is designed the way it is, is still the same, and even Trignometry turning out to be essential decades later for doing game development.
So even in a fast changing field like Software Engineering a Degree does make a huge difference, not from memorizing bleeding edge knowledge but from the foundational knowledge you get, the understanding of the tought processes behind designing things and the learning to learn.
I got an Electronics Engineering Degree almost 30 years ago (and, funnilly enough, I then made my career as a software engineer and I barelly used the EE stuff professionally except when I was working in high-performance computing, but that’s a side note) and back then one of my software development teachers told us “Every 5 years half of what you know becomes worthless”.
All these years later, from my experience he was maybe being a little optimist.
Programming is something you can learn by yourself (by the time I went to Uni I was already coding stuff in Assembly purelly for fun and whilst EE did have programming classes they added to maybe 5% of the whole thing, though nowadays with embedded systems its probably more), but the most important things that Uni taught me were the foundational knowledge (maths, principles of engineering, principles of design) and how to learn, and those have served me well to keep up with the whole loss of relevance of half I know every 5 years, sometimes in unexpect ways like how obscure details of microprocessor design I learned there being usefull when designing high performance systems, the rationalle for past designs speeding up my learning of new things purelly because why stuff is designed the way it is, is still the same, and even Trignometry turning out to be essential decades later for doing game development.
So even in a fast changing field like Software Engineering a Degree does make a huge difference, not from memorizing bleeding edge knowledge but from the foundational knowledge you get, the understanding of the tought processes behind designing things and the learning to learn.