But honestly, why would you activate the "hype" category? I can go to my local community college if I want to hear people say "my AI is alive" or "you should always optimize locally."

That being said... CMU always had a decent program (as did UIUC.) They came down in my estimation when they started granting trade school degrees. In the old days, you had to take a class on parsing and foundations of computing to graduate. You could talk to a grad who knew what a recursive descent parser was and what it's drawbacks were. And there's a chance they could understand the basics of Turing's paper(s).

There's a maxim I read somewhere that undergrad was supposed to change the way you thought more than teaching you facts (and maybe skills.) What I liked about the old system is you were taught a concept (functional decomposition, for instance) and then concrete examples were given to support the concepts. Now it seems like students are taught where to download python packages and enough unix commands to type in example code from online forums.

CS pedagogy in the states is a joke, but I guess if I want someone to write a PHP plugin for wordpress, I know where to go.

#OldManYellsAtClouds