Scott, a onetime interior design major turned information architect, is speaking only metaphorically, of course. But he says learning about "critical adjacencies of space" -- such as putting restrooms near conference rooms so that meeting attendees can quickly duck in and out -- carries over to Web design, where the "critical adjacencies" are of information.

Scott's migration from architecture into the technology industry isn't atypical: Talk to a group of tech workers, and you may find that the majority of them drifted into the industry from a completely different discipline.

The Web industry is creating jobs at a clip, and many of those jobs are going to college graduates without academic computing experience -- and people who skipped college altogether. No one has taken a formal count of these two groups, but they haven't gone unnoticed. And their success raises the question of whether a computer science education, or even any higher education, is a prerequisite to competing in the high-tech job market.

The relevance of higher education to high-tech jobs is under scrutiny, thanks to the rising number of success stories featuring someone who majored in a right-brained specialty, bypassed college or dropped out -- the most famous example being Harvard dropout Bill Gates. In December, Forbes asked if investing in a college education was a smart way to spend time investing in a career. Among the numbers the article cited: Close to 15 percent of the Forbes 400 either dropped out of college or avoided it altogether, and those executives boast an average net worth of $4.8 billion. A few weeks later, U.S. News and World Report ran a related article: More boys are opting out of college to pursue jobs in a booming economy.

There is ample incentive to trade higher education for high-salaried, high-tech jobs. Forbes noted that a college degree costing $120,000 might actually be worth more as a mutual fund with a 5 percent interest rate; if a teenager's parents sink the $30,000 they would have spent on the first year's tuition into a mutual fund for their child, he'll have $500,000 by the time he turns 50. Many college graduates, especially those who spend their early postgraduate years paying off student loans, will never see that much in the bank. The article also contends that colleges are unable to keep up with the proliferation of programming languages and technologies driving today's job market, and thus do not outfit their students with the necessary job skills. Is it any wonder would-be tech tyros rethink college?

The übergeek news portal Slashdot posted a link to the Forbes article and found itself hosting a 300-plus-message argument on the merits of education in relation to high-tech jobs. The respondents were evenly split: Some younger programmers argued that their practical experience and high salaries offset the disadvantages of lacking a degree, while others argued that a formal education leads to a higher caliber of technical work later in life.

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