Not that I don't agree with you, but are the universities meant to be that vocational? Are they there for specific job skills or more for general knowledge rather then specific skill sets?
Universities should not be vocational and neither should high schools, IMO, but for some reason in the US the idea of purely vocational education is taboo. So the two get mashed together and you get this tension between the lofty notions of a liberal education and the need to make a living.
Separating people who want to build car engines from people who want a liberal education at the secondary level is seen as a sort of elitism.
I totally agree that they shouldn't be vocational, I was just pointing out that the guy's arguments about what was useful for the job market were totally specious. I personally think schools should teach Computer Science instead of just Programming (or, if they want to be vocational and give people certificates in Java Programming go for it, just don't call it a BSCS) and that they should expose you to a large variety of languages, techniques, and ways of thinking. There are plenty of things to complain about with CS coursework at various places, but saying Java is useless in the real world or that debugging compiler or processor issues is a critical skill for every engineer is ludicrous.
