>Time a student has in university is better spent on getting deeper understanding of things that are hard to pick up in the workplace, and that give you a bette

>Time a student has in university is better spent on getting deeper understanding of things that are hard to pick up in the workplace, and that give you a better picture of the industry in the long run That may be the case, but the job market for grads is fierce (or at least was when I went through the gauntlet 5 years ago) and projects absolutely help students stand out. >burdening open source maintainers with training students in these issues is hardly a good idea I've had exactly this happen - a random Argentinian student I met on Reddit modernised a whole lot of my project's codebase and we went through the review process together etc. "Burden" is not the word I'd use; it was a positive experience without a doubt and the contributions he made were generally of a high standard.