My university's CS curriculum didn't teach us to use any technologies at all, besides extremely basic Unix and C++. If you wanted to build anything outside of

My university's CS curriculum didn't teach us to use any technologies at all, besides extremely basic Unix and C++. If you wanted to build anything outside of GCC then it was up to you. And you still had to figure out how to set up makefiles on your own. CS isn't about learning technologies. It's about learning the math and science behind computation theory. You don't learn things like Visual Studio 2010 or how to set up an EC2 instance or how to build iPhone apps. You learn how to build a compiler, the data structures behind file- and operating-systems, and networking fundamentals (among many other things of course) so that you can then learn specific technologies on your own. If you know why TCP was invented and the core networking stack, and you know what a compiler is and how it does its magic, and when to use a linked list instead of a dictionary, then you have the tools to figure out how to build an iPhone app--or how to use any other computer technology--on your own time. Edit: I also want to add that CS does change, and learning networking or something like RDBMS theory might not have been common 10 or 20 years ago. But there's few fields worth learning that don't change in that sort of timespan. Core CS principles do change, but probably not much slower or faster than things like physics or medicine. You probably wouldn't argue that a physics degree is worthless because 10 years ago they didn't teach the Higgs Boson (or whatever, I'm not a physicist :) )