As has been mentioned, Spring Framework/Hibernate/JQuery or Grails would be excellent options

If your plan is to acquire skills to become more marketable then Spring MVC/Hibernate/JQuery would be a good choice as there are plenty of opportunities that require those skills. The Spring Framework alone is used by over 50% of Java developers worldwide according to VMware. See http://www.vmware.com/products/application-platform/vfabric/overview.html.

Another great choice would be Grails. Grails is written with Groovy which is easy to learn if you have a Java background. It uses Spring/Hibernate/Sitemesh/JQuery behind the scenes. Because it emphasizes convention over configuration you won’t spend much time “wiring up” the parts of your application and you will start off by using many best practices for web development which could otherwise have taken you a long time to learn. Grails, however, is not as marketable as Spring/Hibernate/Jquery.

I have personally worked with both choices and prefer Grails. But, like I said, many employers have not warmed up to it yet.

I agree with you that "[a]s a professional programmer, you will be learning throughout your entire career."

On that point, when I went to school they taught me pascal, fortran, c, c++, lisp, prolog, awk among other languages. I do not use any of those languages today. Since school I have worked with Java, JavaScript, .Net, PHP, Ruby, Perl, Unix Shell scripting among others. For each of the new technologies I learned (on my own), I was faced with a sink or swim problem in that in order for me to continue to be productive at what I was doing I needed to learn the new technology fast. If I sunk I would be either out of a job or making less that I otherwise could have been.

Because programming is evolving at an break neck speed. Those students that would not have made it pass at a programming class are just setting themselves up for failure when given a second chance. I say this because, once they are our of academia, in the work environment they are going to be expected to pivot to new technologies with ease. This constant learning is required just to survive. Chances are if you did not survive the first sink or swim experience, you are not going to survive the lifetime of sink or swim experiences that await you.

There are people that go to college to learn a set of skills that they can immediately apply to a job opportunity.
Programming on the other hand requires that you master a number of fundamental concepts and later recognize when to apply those concepts while working with a new tool/language that you just may be learning,

The original poster might want to look at something like the HandyKey Twiddler or build something similar. The Twiddler is an external single handled mouse keyboard combo. It was very popular among people who wanted to build a wearable computer during the 90s. Think Thad Starner and Steve Mann.

With the Twiddler, your wrist maintains a more neutral position while typing and performing mouse operations. Keys are type by pressing "chords" similar to the way a guitarist uses his/her left hand on the neck of the guitar. See the Wikipedia Chorded Keyboard entry. I think it has a high learning curve but I have read somewhere of people being able to type 40+ words per minute using it.

The Twiddler is not cheap, however, the company that made the Twiddler stopped making them a few years back, and only recently a different company started selling them again for $215 plus shipping from Canada.

Another option is to try voice recognition.

If you learn HTML/CSS/Javascript you can target Android/IOS and the Web.

Tools you can use include:
Appcelerator
Sencha Touch plus Phonegap

You can read this article for more information and other options.