I think there is a disconnect here between different people's expectation and reality. Having been on both sides. I can sympathise. In the UK the responsibili

I think there is a disconnect here between different people's expectation and reality. Having been on both sides. I can sympathise. In the UK the responsibility of preparing students for wider world lies with the University. (this is the perspective of many lectures who teach within stem) The departments believe their commitment to teaching is finished after assessing the students ability within their chosen field, that's their job and the universities provide external optional support material which they believe covers everything else. The students that teaching staff spend the most of their time with are doctoral students. Speaking frankly these students have passed a filter to being students willing to work at a problem for hours. This is not a guarantee they're the best, but they are normally the most hardworking. There is a huge expectation that these students teach themselves missing skills and abilities. This is what teaching professors expect from all students. Although it would help if they said that. Some lectures are just plain awful at teaching. Like some Coders make bad managers. Some are doing it because their successful position to pay for their really expensive toys in labs demands it. Imo these lecturers need to be taken aside and disciplined for failing at their job because a single bad lecturer in the wrong topic can do a _lot_ of damage to a department's reputation and functioning... However most lecturers work assuming they're speaking to PhD students mainly because they spend so much other time with them. It's difficult to identify that for 2 hours a week you're speaking to a room of people without the common skillset to be a PhD student. (I'm not spreaking of raw ability and intellect, it's the mindset to focus on a problem for days or weeks until you understand it by yourself) The problem is for UG students that often don't know what skills they're missing to be of most use to outside academia. Being about to identify and work on this is askill in and off its own right. Imo it's much less that staff try to mould students to academia and much more that students who are of the correct mindset find their way there. The expectation is that UG students would identify where they need to work to become more attractive to an employer. And that they will seak extra material out and train for this. (academics are the people who setup how the university works and they follow the academic model amidst everywhere, which, well... works when you understand the unwritten rules) This is different to the expectation that teachers teach you everything you need to be useful. (my background is coming from a state school which was demolished down for failing) I can see how paying huge amounts of money creates an expectation now that the university should prepare you to enter the workforce straight away. It took me until PhD to appreciate this and my grades at UG weren't exceptional but from comparing notes to colleagues over the years this is one of the cultural differences which seems to come from expensive private schools vs state funded local failing "sports specialist" schools. Fighting against this at a institutional level is like shouting at a wall imo so I just make the best effort I can to make a difference with students who cross my path who are falling into the same traps and feeling let down by the uni overall. (my favourite being a lecturer I keep arguing with that is bad at his teaching because I (a native English speaker) need a thesaurus to follow his lecture slides, this does not help meaningfully convey the finger points of data driven physics labs to international students, despite the fact that's how it was taught at Eaton)