Degrees are pretty much not worth anything these days.
There was a time (just in the past century), when doormen had to know multiple foreign languages well, and sometimes a degree was required. I do not know a single place that would even ask for one today (of a doorman). Note that I am reflecting mostly on IT -- I would still expect a doctor to have a stamped piece of TP from some U, but during the past few years, new technologies appear so fast, that by the time college-goes learn them, they're no longer used. Sure, college is great for general education, it does stimulate the brain, but in IT it gives absolutely nothing directly making the person a better professional. Additionally, due to immense competition and drop in prices, software today competes much less using quality and much more using quantity (of new features, that is). This has led to a smaller demand in real software architects, people who need a true university base in math, advanced logic, language (for writing documentation), and a greater demand for developers. And with the advances in development tools, it became much easier to become a decent coder, then progress to a developer level on the job.
I consider myself to be a good interviewer -- I have very good retention rates of people I have "passed", and I don't look at degrees at all when deciding whether to dump the resume right off or advance it to step 2. The language of the resume suffices to determine whether a person is an idiot or not. And before spending a lot of time and money inviting a person for an interview, I make a 5-minute phone call. That always tells me more than a physical presence of a degree would. The groucho sounded more like an unhappy dinosaur stuck in a dull desk job in an office without windows for 20 years, and now unloading a "wealth" of his IBM/360 and PDP-11 project development experience into the 3rd millenium.
Now, back to the original question.
Dude, learn Delphi!. It is not used very much, but such a pleasure to work with. If you ever become a true OOP-buff, you will have near-orgasmic experiences from the elegance of the language itself. If this is for a hobby, definitely do the D. If you're imagining an eventual job change, Java would probably be a more proper recommendation (also in Borland, of course -- JBuilder 7 is just out). But I have made quite a career in Delphi before switching to desktop Java and then to JSP back in the day. Well, that remote "day" was just a couple of years ago. However, I still have a lot of old contacts calling me up offering Delphi projects, the market is even growing a bit, so overall I would recommend Delphi for the art of IT with average career potential or Java for good money. It's still a bit babyish today as far as the language itself goes -- keeps getting slightly reworked every now and again, and writing any sort of decent GUI in it is practically impossible still, although great advances have been made with J 2 -- I just looked at some app that used to fall apart in 1.1.6, but now runs in JRE 1.4, and it's almost possible not to throw up every 2 minutes, so it's getting there.
Also, if C# is Microsoft's Java, what is J#? Just a side question. I went to some Sun's presentation recently, and found out Java doesn't run under Windows XP. I guess I was hallucinating for the past year or so. The C# statement makes about as much sense as the Java / XP one.
28-yo former Fortune 500 exec with no college degree.
PS: "Former" doesn't mean I got fired, I started my own Co.
