"In creating a new market for digital imaging Adobe also managed to kill off another market; photo printing and film developing. I'm sure in the corporate halls of companies like Fuji and Kodak, Photoshop is about as popular as a Christmas-time shaved ice vendor in Moscow."

Somehow I doubt that. Photoshop doesn't put glossy paper in your printer or make it easy to print a whole memory card's worth of photos at once. Those were separate developments that led to the widespread adoption of the digital format.

If anything I'd say businesses adopting those all in one kiosks helped kill film. Now instead of needing to set up your own print lab with expensive paper, ink, and printer, you could take your CD or stick to WalMart or CVS.

You don't use debuggers? Ever? That, to me, seems more inefficient and wasteful than any downsides to developing within an IDE. So when something gets bollocksed up, you just start guessing where the problem is, as opposed to stepping through the program and examining it? Or do you just stick ten thousand print statements in?

Even for the trivial C projects I've had in my CIS courses at uni I was glad to have some basic knowledge on how to use GDB. It's a lot easier, in my mind, to look at the program as it executes and see exactly what broke (bad memory allocation or deallocation, wrong function call, whatever) then to make a change, try again, make another change, try again...

After your first or second job, how many of the interviewers cared about the name of your university versus your performance at your previous jobs? It should make no difference whether you got your BS from a state college or an Ivy League school, provided you've got a good track record as being motivated and a worker who produces results. If you expect to trade on your school's reputation rather than your own ability, perhaps science isn't the field for you.

"The same goes for the reputation of the companies you choose to work for."

Please quote where I said anything about the companies you work for. All I said was that the expense/prestige of your university will likely not be a factor once you graduate.

Now yes, if your school is known for graduating people who are abysmal in their field, that's a problem -- but again, that's something you should be considering when applying. My point isn't that there are schools with superior computer science, engineering, etc. programs, my point is that the cost or fame of a school does not give you a different degree than everyone else. There's no proprietary "MIT Brand" physics that's being taught there. The UMass system still follows Newton's rules. Now you might prefer MIT for other, valid reasons, but you can't claim that MIT's reputation will far outweigh your performance after you graduate. Smart people succeed, regardless of where they go.

"...the massive lecture hall synonymous with achieving a bachelors of science."

Synonymous? Maybe at large colleges, but guess what -- you can get a degree without that experience. It's called a smaller school. Sadly, many of my high school compatriots looked at "name brand" first, and size or cost second, if at all. For any high school slashdotters listening, I have a secret -- it's the same degree. My father went to state school in RI, and was recruited by Raytheon before he'd even graduated. He was working alongside graduates from all the Ivy Leagues, getting paid the same. It doesn't matter what the name on the diploma is, what matters is the effort you put in and the skills you provide for your employer. Save your money, avoid crippling student loan debt, and get those smaller class sizes anyways.

Smaller university equals smaller classes. The largest class I've ever had at my university was 40 students -- hardly unmanageable. Consider these things first, since you're going to school for your degree, not bragging rights, at least ostensibly so.