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But the purpose of schools has always been to "teach the academic side." The whole system until recently has been that schools give you the foundational knowledge, and you learn the skills at work -- in olden days, corporations would actually train you on the job.

But then:

1) Employers decided that it's better to lay off people you don't need anymore, which meant that

2) Employees realized it's more lucrative to jump from employer to employer than maintain loyalty for a company, which meant that

3) Employers realized it's not productive to spend 6 months training a junior who's going to leave in 8.

Trade schools and community colleges will focus more on skills than theory, but there's an image problem among well off children... and the social environment is far different (boring by most 19yo standards).

They've already found a solution for that class image problem -- upcycling "trade school" into "bootcamp."

Now you can live in your tiny home as a minimalist and participate in a bootcamp, instead of living in a trailer park and going to community college.

> It's a failure of the education system. They want to teach the academic side but ignore the skill side.

Common misconception, but no this is not a failure of the academic side. This is exactly what universities are for. The thinking always was that if you teach the fundamentals, then the practical applications are a foregone conclusion. Someone who is well versed in advanced theories of computer science and electrical engineering: boolean logic, circuits, abstract computation machines and models of computing, data structures, algorithms, language design should be able to pick up whatever FooBar FOTM programming language or paradigm or framework that comes out.

If you think that the situation today is difficult with all the languages and frameworks we have just know that it was almost the exact same back then as well, except you didn't have the internet, chat rooms, and robust documentation and Q/A sites to help you answer your questions. Imagine the, excuse my frank language here, whining that would be happening right now on this forum and many others if you were just slapped with an IBM manual and told to bootstrap things yourself. I could only imagine!

Trade schools are suppose to be the institutions that teach you practical skills "to get a job". Universities are for expanding your mind and learning. I don't know why we mixed the two and then act surprised when a multi-century institution fails at modern workforce demands.

To anyone reading this: Do NOT go to a University to get a job. If your goal is just to get a job in this field, you can do that in far easier and cheaper ways (start reading some programming docs and get busy building things). You go to a university to learn. The getting a job part is a natural consequence of the learning you have done and are now are able to do.

I don't see the people in the chemistry department saying, "We don't teach students to stir shit in test tubes we teach fundamentals!". I get it, they're not there to teach job skills but it's also not an excuse to completely ignore it. If you want to do gas chromatography you're going to have to learn to use the machine. You don't just say, "Hey get some trade school person to do it" and it isn't just a "foregone conslusion" from fundamentals.

This is not an apt counter analogy for many reasons, and actually can be made to argue against the point you are trying to make. I'll give a few examples here:

- In a computer science education, you do indeed still use a computer.

- There are still proprietary techniques, substrates, solutions and materials that industry chemists use that you almost certainly don't have access to in your standard university classroom. These would be akin to the variety of frameworks, tools, and libraries that exist in the programming world, many of which are open and documented, many of which are proprietary and closed sourced. Hopefully, however, your university education has taught you how to learn to learn in order to use these things.

- Chemistry is not about test tubes and beakers. That's just what it looks like today. Likewise Programming by typing characters on a screen is just what it looks like today. To introduce another analogy, just like Geometry is no longer about rulers and measuring pyramids, Computer Science is about how to formalize knowledge and it just happens to look like semicolons, braces, and 0's and 1's today.

This x1000. Universities are not trade schools but definitely over the last couple decades have been used as such by companies because for certain fields, that's "all there was". Couple that with the "everyone must go to college" mantra of the past decade or so and you get the prevailing thought you have described.

Yeah I see people complain all the time that graduates with a "Computer Science" degree don't know "tools of the trade" like source control, debugging, etc.

Computer Science isn't about learning a trade, you're learning a science.

Yet another argument to better/more trade schools that are multi-year programs (like an Associate's degree) rather than universities.

What I see with CS/Engineering grads is those who are clumsy with practical skills are just as bad with fundamentals.

That's often been my experience as well. Some students choose the major because it is interesting to them and they're smart and motivated, others choose it because they think there's a six figure job on the other side of the door. Smart and motivated people will be good regardless of curriculum content, people doing just enough to get by will be bad regardless of curriculum content.

> if you were just slapped with an IBM manual

To be fair, manuals used to be better.

As a young lad, working at an IT consulting company I once got sent out to "fix the computer" at some cruise line. I went out with no idea what I'd encounter, and found myself faced with an IBM system I'd never even seen before. Fortunately, the service manual was with it and with its aid I was able to effect a circuit level repair and got them back up and running. ::shrugs::

The material you can dig up on the internet is worlds better than poor documentation. But a comparison with good documentation isn't always so clear.

I think it's a fundamental divide between people who see degrees as a way to expand your knowledge and people who see degrees as a fast track to getting a better job. Somewhere in the middle is the ultimate spot for an educational institution to be. For example, MIT has somewhat recently started a class on "hacker tools" (https://missing.csail.mit.edu/) with stuff like shell scripting, Vim, Git, debuggers, and general computer knowledge.

The trouble is that the tooling du jour gets out of date quickly. People who know how to use Eclipse, Java, and Subversion because that's what they used in school might not have the skills to pick up the tooling used in another company (say VS Code, JavaScript, and Git). The foundation of CS knowledge is changed much more slowly.

School should encourage the curiosity to learn on one's own and provide resources to help. It should also provide a framework to be taught things that will last beyond the end of the degree. They need to do a better job of instilling curiosity, but they shouldn't go all the way to the other side and become vocational training.

> They're taught the language but none of the tooling

I want to expand on this a bit, as I think what students are being thought is the syntax of languages but none of the "how do you design a project continuously as requirements change?" which is the really difficult part of software engineering. So they might know how to write the code, but they don't know how to come up with what to actually write.

It is a co-failing of education and employers. Employers should be hiring Software developers\engineers instead of computer scientists. Educational institutions should have more\stronger Software Engineering programs, and software developer job training programs.

Instead we get the odd equivalent of companies hiring math and physics majors and being suprised they aren't electrical engineers.

That sucks, but it's equally bad when "seniors" have no idea how stuff works outside of their little IDE bubble.

I don't think it's bad. Companies need engineers with depth experience just as much as engineers with breadth experience.

I've had students come in from other colleges (usually lower-ranked for-profit schools) that were great. They actually built useful projects and wrote non-trivial code.

Where I work we regularly get a bunch of kids from the neighborhood college who have projects but are looking for mentors, or are looking for projects/mentors. Its not at all complicated to setup.

Don't wait around for stuff to happen. Call the local Univ CS dept head and have a chat. Its much more effective than talking to kids or expecting them to do things by themselves.