Just wanted to add my experience as someone in the UK that graduated at a UK university.
The various software engineering modules I had were pretty lacking and flawed in their teaching and I could tell that at the time and even now with several years on industry experience I still believe they are lacking foundational areas especially the ones you identified.
For example:
- Databases were barely taught or even used. We had some fairly poorly put together “web” module that covered PHP, a tiny bit of SQL, no HTML, CSS, JS.
- Networking module was “here is a Cisco CLI, setup RIP following these instructions, congratulations you are now network experts”. I think we covered NAT in one module.
It seems to be a deeper issue too. I remember that the vast majority of people in the software engineering modules couldn’t not just write code - they’d never even so much as attempted it.
This was in other modules too - a majority didn’t know what operating systems were beyond “what, there’s things other than windows?” all the way to being for all intents and purposes tech illiterate.
To the point I remember a second year teaching another second year what copy and pasting is.
This was around 2012-2015.
So I don’t know where the blame likes really, I think it’s all an amalgamation of:
- Clear lack of interest or passion about anything in their degree of study (why the hell sign up for it then, with so many people doing that?)
- Completely failed tech or STEM education
- Total failure to vet applications to the university
- Whatever STEM GCSE or A levels they had gained clearly not being up to scratch
- Some modules being so dumbed down as to be meaningless or something you couldn’t gain equivalent learning from googling for a few days
The various software engineering modules I had were pretty lacking and flawed in their teaching and I could tell that at the time and even now with several years on industry experience I still believe they are lacking foundational areas especially the ones you identified.
For example:
- Databases were barely taught or even used. We had some fairly poorly put together “web” module that covered PHP, a tiny bit of SQL, no HTML, CSS, JS.
- Networking module was “here is a Cisco CLI, setup RIP following these instructions, congratulations you are now network experts”. I think we covered NAT in one module.
It seems to be a deeper issue too. I remember that the vast majority of people in the software engineering modules couldn’t not just write code - they’d never even so much as attempted it.
This was in other modules too - a majority didn’t know what operating systems were beyond “what, there’s things other than windows?” all the way to being for all intents and purposes tech illiterate.
To the point I remember a second year teaching another second year what copy and pasting is.
This was around 2012-2015.
So I don’t know where the blame likes really, I think it’s all an amalgamation of:
- Clear lack of interest or passion about anything in their degree of study (why the hell sign up for it then, with so many people doing that?)
- Completely failed tech or STEM education
- Total failure to vet applications to the university
- Whatever STEM GCSE or A levels they had gained clearly not being up to scratch
- Some modules being so dumbed down as to be meaningless or something you couldn’t gain equivalent learning from googling for a few days