Interesting that you went from music to programming. About 20 years ago I was talking with a guy who had a national company that provided customized software for businesses. The H1B visa issue was a topic back then. I asked him if he was able to find enough US programmers. He said he hired from three areas: computer science, math, and music. Computer science is obvious. Math makes sense. But music? He said that music majors were great at pattern recognition, which was very useful in coding.
Both are invisible moving architecture - and music IS pure math looked at one way ... any hook in any song can be reduced to the math that torques your brain in the right way ... it's like legos ... but the legos must move ... and ... you can't see the legos ... but there is a language to represent the legos. Bach would have loved loved loved it. Courtney Love or the Dixie Chicks probably not so much.
For anyone who already knows they find it programmy-stuff interesting ... like people who like playing with excel spreadsheets ... I say go for it.
Any of you who have poor starving Jazz musician sons ... is 14K too much to pay to get them permanently out of your house? It's a no brainer given the cost of a degree. It's just that you have to actually find it interesting.
In the 80s, I got one guy who was great from a PhD program in Slavic Linguistics. Understanding the structure, logic, and evolution of human languages is a closely-related skill. When I first sat down at the keypunch machine in 1979, I knew nearly nothing about programming but could read Greek and Latin fairly easily.
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Great book the examines the commonalities between math, art and music,