… and with the market into which he graduated. This Penn State CS major laments the content received at his school prior to graduation, and he makes a few good points, but also seems to miss a major point, which is that college in these tracks is not supposed to be about training for this or that other tech skill, but in learning about how to think and solve problems.
We don’t know from this distance what happens at Penn, but generally it seems true: most schools actually do a very poor job of articulating what all of their graduates should be known for. There are dumbed down Gen Ed goals (made elastic in order to accommodate most of whatever it is some faculty member wants to teach on a given day) and then the major content, which in a research school (at least in STEM tracks) is the tech revolving around the faculty’s interests du jour. That goes double for here in CS at University of Maryland, where we have never reached a consensus on what it means to be a journeyman computing scientist.