Generalizing the college experiences of the writer to all college experiences is not doing anyone any favors. My college experience was nothing like that: in i

Generalizing the college experiences of the writer to all college experiences is not doing anyone any favors. My college experience was nothing like that: in intro CS, we were taught Java concepts as the basics of object-oriented programming, and the second class was the basics of advanced data structures, again using Java. As a result, when I saw Python code, it was trivial for me to read it, and after looking at it for a short time I was comfortable writing it. When I took my current job, I had never written Javascript before; I picked it up in a day. Even Scheme wasn't hard to pick up when I took Declarative. Oh, and I never had a class in CS with more than 15 people in it. Just saying. You can learn programming in college, but you should not expect classes on "AJAX, jQuery, iOS apps, APIs". Once you know how to program, you can easily figure out how to do any of those things by reading documentation and tutorials. With my college CS classes, I can read and understand Android's developer guides and PHP's online documentation. That's what's important.