[_sdfo]

There are two sides to this kind of teaching. If you're MIT, you can afford to hire great lecturers who know to teach the students fundamental and deep truths about the tools they're using and not trivia. That way, they can generalize onto other tools, so anyone who studied git can quickly adapt to using cvs or svn. My university (in a developing country) is on the other side. Last semester was a disaster.

We had an AWS course, half of which was memorizing information about pricing and S3 tiers. If I were going into a job as an AWS guy, I'd definitely have to know that, but this is just third year of undergrad in CS :-/ and not a training course. The quizzes also had deliberately deceiving questions, which is the worst type of trivia!

Even better example. The Windows Server course was also compulsory (just like the AWS course) and mainly consisted of memorizing trivial information about context menus, which buttons to click and the licensing terms/durations/prices for different Windows Server versions. I'm jaded from the experience. Got my first two Cs in both since I spent time learning stuff described in the post instead of that nonsense.

[kabes]

I find it very weird to see something like an AWS course in a university-level CS curriculum.

[slumdev]

AWS and Windows Server courses are definitely not university-level CS courses.

[Nikaoto]

Yep. And the sad part is that some of the students I met here don't realize what they're learning is not CS. I only applied to avoid the compulsory military service, I was already learning a bunch on my job.

On the bright side, the local job market demands match what they teach here very well. According to my anecdata, lots of students who had no knowledge or experience working as programmers now have full-time jobs mostly as web developers. Looks like the university's doing its job and I'm just a whiny C student.

[poutrathor]

That's because each university caters to some business needs. Top universities form students towards engineering careers because that's what the market requires and expects them to be.

Low rank universities train students to be button pushers in a world of increasingly automated systems. Because that's also what the market needs : people to keep the systems running and run applications updates.

The good thing ? Developing is one of the fairest trade : if you are good, you will manage to find good job and decent money without much struggle.