When I learnt CS in university in my opinion 99% of them were unemployable after graduating. They simply didn't have the depth or hands on experience to build or understanding anything of any complexity.
This may be different in different universities and it may have changed today, but the tests we took were largely about remembering lecture talking points and being able to regurgitate them with or without any real understanding.
For example, you might learn a bit about relational databases, but your understanding will be limited to the talking points of the lecture. Eg, you might get question to explain the use of primary keys, but if you were asked them how you might design a relational database for some data with normalized tables they'd have no idea, because they'd never have actually put the talking points into use.
It upset me because by the time I had finished university I had launched two startups and worked professionally as a developer for 3 years. I was consistently helping students with practical exercises while at uni given I was one of the most capable on the course, but none of my experience really helped me in the tests because I discovered so little of it was about practical understanding, and mostly just an extended English exam tested mostly on writing ability and being able to regurgitate talking points in lecture slides.
It's not that the students weren't smart or capable individuals, its just that the course didn't incentivise obtaining depth of knowledge in what was taught so no one did.
>When I learnt CS in university in my opinion 99% of them were unemployable after graduating.
I was fortunate to get my degree where I did. In our RDBMS course, the mid-term and final was to build a fairly sophisticated model based on a set of written (in English not code) requirements.
In our senior two semester class (I forgot the name), we had to design and spec out an application first semester using Microsoft project (I'm old) and in the second semester, we had to build it and demo it to the class the last few weeks.
That's been my experience as well working with interns. It's like they teach a lot of theoretical stuff but no practicalities. Kind of pointless to even go to school if you don't learn practicalities IMHO.
This may be different in different universities and it may have changed today, but the tests we took were largely about remembering lecture talking points and being able to regurgitate them with or without any real understanding.
For example, you might learn a bit about relational databases, but your understanding will be limited to the talking points of the lecture. Eg, you might get question to explain the use of primary keys, but if you were asked them how you might design a relational database for some data with normalized tables they'd have no idea, because they'd never have actually put the talking points into use.
It upset me because by the time I had finished university I had launched two startups and worked professionally as a developer for 3 years. I was consistently helping students with practical exercises while at uni given I was one of the most capable on the course, but none of my experience really helped me in the tests because I discovered so little of it was about practical understanding, and mostly just an extended English exam tested mostly on writing ability and being able to regurgitate talking points in lecture slides.
It's not that the students weren't smart or capable individuals, its just that the course didn't incentivise obtaining depth of knowledge in what was taught so no one did.