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Comment by owlglass | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to add my experience. I did a year of English in university, then switched to a software engineering major after internalizing all the "an English degree is useless" rhetoric.

While I am glad I didn't spend the ~$32,000 CAD it would have cost to get an English degree, I do wish I'd enrolled in a CS/English double major to get the benefits of technical studies and a humanities education. I have realized that, while I like software, a corporate job is just a means to an end to what I really enjoy: shared experience and art.

On another note, I did make the mistake of paying $15,000 CAD/year for a software engineering degree compared to $8,000/year for a CS degree. Now, in my final year, I'm taking many of the same classes CS students take. I would warn anyone in the same position in Canada (or the US) to seriously compare the two curricula when making a decision.

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> On another note, I did make the mistake of paying $15,000 CAD/year for a software engineering degree compared to $8,000/year for a CS degree. Now, in my final year, I'm taking many of the same classes CS students take. I would warn anyone in the same position in Canada (or the US) to seriously compare the two curricula when making a decision.

I find this interesting, at least at the school I attended, there was no difference in pricing between degrees like this. Almost all of the computer related programs are just included under a BS (bachelor of science) and covered by normal tuition.

There were certainly focus differences between something like Computer Engineering vs Computational Media vs Electrical and Computer Engineering, but the prices were the same, and many of the core classes were the same.

The "software engineering" degree only exists because the Faculty of Engineering didn't want to miss out on the firehose of demand for CS degrees in the last couple of decades that went to the Faculty of Science. Effectively though, "software engineering" is just a parallel CS program taught by the Faculty of Engineering.

As far as I understand, universities' reasoning for differential tuition varies from demand for a particular major, projected earning potential, and the cost of providing the major itself (for example, a civil engineering student requires all the material and facilities for their labs and field courses).

In Canada, this differential pricing between engineering and other majors is applied to all engineering disciplines, which is why software ends up with a higher cost than computer science, despite there being very few tangible differences in the curricula.

In my opinion, a model like that of your school's is much more reasonable, given that many of the core classes are the same.

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