I was fortunate to be hired right of college (liberal arts) by a large company that sent me to a fulltime 8 week programming school run by IBM.

I have probably mentioned this before - years ago (I believe early 1970's), IBM went on a recruiting effort that broke with the common thought at the time. They visited colleges and sought out the best and the brightest in the liberal arts areas. I'm not talking about pot-smoking hippies who managed to bluff their way to a 3.5 GPA, but ones viewed by their professors as ones with the sharpest minds in areas of history, composition, and even music.

I'm not saying that an 18 year old should study Russian history and hope that Bill Gates shows up on campus. But skills in these areas are transferable to many things.