You need to understand what has come before so that you can build upon it effectively. Taking past progress for granted will not help develop the future; if any

You need to understand what has come before so that you can build upon it effectively. Taking past progress for granted will not help develop the future; if anything, you'll get a lot more reinvented wheels. Among the higher-level problems you mentioned, how many of them are interrelated? I'd rather see professors cover material that is useful in 80% of cases, even if they are well-trodden topics - students can specialise in the rest. In my CS course (UK) we studied parallel systems, including MapReduce; distributed databases and NLP can be studied optionally along with several other topics of much higher level than mere page faults. That said, not all CS courses are created equal.