Sure, it's possible to catch up, but we're talking about at least four years of potential experience. That means spending years catching up, which can seriously impact you career.

Not a unique problem to software either. My sister in-law is a mechanical engineer. Her first employer was upset she didn't know anything practical, and only knew theory. She had to spend years catching up.

Some technical universities in EU solve this problem by having full-time practical courses e.g. in January and June. For example, as a CS freshman you can build a really solid background in functional programming by going through a sequence of SML or Haskell courses in Autumn and Spring and spend January and June learning trendy technologies in depth. It's the best from both worlds.

I agree, but those don't need to be the languages you use in all classes. I learned a few assembly and academic languages (MIPS and LISP) in classes for those two topics, and it was absolutely useful to learn how to think in terms of those languages. The vast majority of our classes were Java though, and that's also been the vast majority of what I've done since graduation. (I think my school has since moved to Python as well)

So I graduated with that really helpful knowledge about why modern languages work how they do, but also a lot of practical experience of actually using those modern languages too.

I don't agree with that. I think Python is a better first language. The better students will get through the program just fine, especially if they really want to learn computer science in depth. And the average ones will at least learn something useful.

If you understand the fundamentals, you can easily switch between languages.

Having taking a course based on HtDP as my first serious coding course in college, it was good at teaching many concepts, but it felt very verbose and was aggressive in its hiding of features that weren't that difficult to grasp.

even better is learning the languages you want to learn

why are you paying a school to teach you something adjacent to what you want to learn so you can learn the thing you need yourself?

> why are you paying a school to teach you something adjacent to what you want to learn so you can learn the thing you need yourself?

Because some topics are easy to learn by yourself, and some are not, so the latter ones are better learned in a college setting.

Learning a language definitely belongs in the first category. Learning computer science goes in the latter category.