You should consider and try to quantify risk: - how much cost is to take classes you consider irrelevant (is it that much?) - the uncertainty whether you are right that those classes are in fact irrelevant - the probability of encountering situations in your future life in which you'd benefit from having a degree

Would it be beneficial if your dad was able to achieve the same on his own by using the language?

Really hard to say I think, anything is possible.

Just by reading your list of requirements.. Google Docs?

Requirement #2 was "open source"

I was going to suggest both TFS and Sharepoint Online, except for requirements #1 and #2. I've set up good documentation repositories with both. Sadly they don't integrate well with Jira, but I've heard good things about Confluence.

Do you mean transition from specific spreadsheets you would already have for that task? Or in a wider sense, e.g. as a company - gradually transition from using spreadsheets to using applications for some of the tasks?

I mean I should be able to take a spreadsheet, properly configured, and turn it into a CRUD app through some sort of wizard.

Or, as a programmer, I should be able to massage an existing spreadsheet (to confirm data types, maybe add some validations) and have that be able to be wrung through a CRUD app generator.

People use spreadsheets because they combine business logic, data, and a simple user interface into a single document. 99% of spreadsheets should actually be CRUD apps (in my experience, at least) but it's not worth the hassle of going that route until you already have close to 30 MB of unstructured, manually edited data.

We're doing the latter (on a rather small scale, mind you), transitioning existing Excel-based applications to scalable, robust architectures: http://excelkoenner.de/ (German-only right now, sorry)