If your goal is to be a programmer, you may find that only a fraction of the courses that you take are relevant to your career aspirations. CS degree requirements are usually more than just learning how to program. A lot of places will require that you take breadth credits from the humanities or social sciences. Besides that, you'll probably be required to take a number of courses within the CS department that are theory related. Although the material you'll be exposed to in these courses is incredibly interesting (IMHO), you may find yourself becoming cynical about why you have to learn material that doesn't really help you become a professional programmer. You'll also have to take a number of math courses (calculus, linear algebra). This stuff is important, since a lot of areas in CS (e.g., AI, graphics), require that you have a solid math foundation.

Depending on where you want to land a job, and what type of software you want to program, you may or may not need a degree. For example, if you want to land a job as a software developer at IBM, you'll probably need a degree. (The work itself doesn't necessarily require a degree, but IBM tends to hire degreed people.) You'll also need a degree if you want to do any hard-core graphics programming.

However, there are a lot of other types of programming jobs out there for which a college diploma will suffice. A college diploma will also cost a lot less money, and you'll be able to complete it in a lot less time.

Your best bet is probably to look at what kind of jobs are out there now and identify which ones appeal to you the most. Once you've identified this, look at the requirements that these jobs list. Do they want a degree? Will they settle for a diploma? Job ads sometimes say "degree or equivalent experience", which usually means that as long as you can demonstrate you'll be able to do the job competently, they don't care whether you have a "B.Sc" after your name.

Good luck, whatever you decide to do.

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Such an ignorantly worded motion should have never passed in the first place. It also took quite sometime for a real apology to be forthcoming, and it was not until after the Carleton president got involved. The initial reaction by CUSA to the backlash was that students and the rest of the country just "didn't get it". Brittany Smyth, the CUSA president, kept trying to explain away the decision as having nothing to do with the clause that said CF was a white male illness. You can hear her here, on CFRA (Ottawa) radio. After a couple of days of public outrage, and a petition to have her impeached, Brittany did finally issue a somewhat mediocre apology.

The real star of this debacle is Donnie Northrup, the 4th year science student who authored the original motion. He made some interesting comments to a reporter of the Ottawa Citizen. Essentially, he regrets that we misunderstood the intent of his motion, and that he should have worded the motion more carefully. He claimed that he slipped up because he had a lot of homework due at the time. And to make himself look like a bigger ass than he's already made himself out to be, he adds that "writing is not something he's focusing his degree on."

So yeah, the decision is being revisited, but the idiots who made it are still idiots, and bringing attention to this stupidity is still worthwhile.