[sevensor]

You're right, of course, there's no place for teachers in the academy, except as members of that most degraded and despised class, contingent faculty. But I think this is a serious problem. Not to put too fine a point on it, but many recipients of engineering degrees being turned out by our well-respected institutions of higher learning can't engineer their way out of a wet paper bag. I worked with people who didn't understand the physical models underlying their discipline. I worked with people who didn't trust statistics, who were easily misled by noise in their data and preferred to eyeball regression lines. I worked with one individual who somehow had a B.S. in electrical engineering despite having real trouble with the concept of plotting points on a Cartesian coordinate plane. These people had degrees from R1 universities. The indifference of career academics to these outcomes is a disaster. It's a disaster I'd hoped to avert, but I can only do my best to get out of its way.

[anjc]

No doubt about it. People made it through 4 years of my CS degree from a good university, and couldn't code a line. However these people all found their place in the workforce which suited their own skills.

I'm not sure how much can be done at the teaching level, but like you, it's something I'd also like to help correct.