[sokoloff]

There’s absolutely a responsibility to educate on the topics needed for the degree to be granted.

This class is an adjacency to an EE or CS candidate. Are universities also failing their students by not offering/requiring a touch-typing class? I don’t think so, in large part because computer science is not programmer occupational training.

[Niksko]

A CS course isn't programmer occupational training in name only. Practically, there aren't many CS research jobs and working as a programmer is more often than not the career path for someone with a CS degree.

Universities can choose to be puritans about what CS is as you seem to be advocating for, or they can be realists and fill a very real gap in skills and knowledge.

Your point about "the topics needed for the degree to be granted" is also a very purist view of the role of university. Is the role of university solely to teach a curriculum that aligns with some abstract ideal of what a particular degree title means? Partly it is. But again, that doesn't match the expectation and the practical reasons why students choose a course. There are very few students studying CS for the beauty of it. Those that do probably do end up in academia and don't need this course. The rest are there for jobs, and they certainly could benefit from this.

[patmorgan23]

What occupation are the vast majority of CS students intending to pursue when they enter a computer science program? What occupation did the vast majority of computer science graduates end up pursuing?

I'm willing to bet the answer to both of those questions is a computer programmer.

[ModernMech]

> Are universities also failing their students by not offering/requiring a touch-typing class?

Universities make assumptions based on the larger student body as to what requirements are needed for admission. Generally, we assume students can read and write and have general computer literacy, but actually the last assumption is starting to fray a bit; more and more, students are coming into school without basic computer desktop literacy. This hasn't been a problem for decades, as students tended just to pick up skills like touch typing. But today, some students are hard pressed to to save a file to the desktop.

I could see universities might actually have to start adding computer literacy as an entrance requirement, the same way we require basic reading and writing and English speaking, so we don't have to teach those things.