jbickel
Well, of course such a background doesn´t get you as much advantage as a math-one or something scientific, cause graphic is a very strange field.
Otherwise you get a lot of knowledge you´ll certainly need in real-life business. It´s not enough to be good at photoshop to make real design and advertising. There is a lot more like color-spaces, printing techniques, typography etc. you definitely won´t know before.
Also it´s a good thing to find your part in creative-business, cause there are a million things you can do with it. You can connect with other and build some kind of network for the first time, which is definitely a benefit later. Well, everybody is a specialist at something
Also I now work at a full-service marketing agency which works for the big players like Nike and Toshiba, i´m not really sure, but I guess it would have taken a lot longer without any background on this to get a job like mine. You can be as good as u want, companies wanna see grades. it´s not all about your skills, it´s also about your ability to get jobs done and your "intelligence" in itself I would say.
The last and great point is the time you have while you are still learning. It has been most creative phase of my life. Now timelines are more than hard and if you really consider to do something graphically (in a real agency) consider to have days from 9-22. Got to know many agencies and they all got such a hard workload. At least the money is good and I still LOVE my job. Feels really good to see your stuff for really big names.
Have a good one!