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Over 15 years ago my son and I visited a top rated engineering school which would have matched his major. I talked him out of it solely on the fact that the undergrads were not allowed to get to the library stacks. They were required to submit requests based on the card catalog.

I remembered when I was in engineering school, at University of Oklahoma, spending hours in the stacks examining books on math, science, and engineering in order to find explanations which met my needs. Many times I would find books outside of the discipline at hand which caught my eye and led to interesting explorations.

It’s like paper dictionaries from which I would typically learn many more words than the one which led me to pick up the book.

I just can’t imagine going to school and not being able to browse the library stacks.

BTW: Examine the curriculum and avoid those which “specialize” or spend a lot of time on the product sets which are popular today; e.g., Big Data. Instead, look for curricula which generalizes.

I have an undergrad degree in electrical engineering from OU and a Masters in Math with a specialty in Computer Science from ASU. I NEVER took a single course devoted to a particular computer language; e.g., FORTRAN. We were always expected to learn the languages on our own.

The only time were were taught “a language” was the class where we were building the compiler for that language.

I led software development for a major computer mainframe company in the areas of database systems, system recovery, and high availability. I have done BIOS development for very large systems. That would be a single system with 16 CPU sockets with hundreds of cores and up to 24 Terabytes of RAM memory. On the other hand, I have also participated in open software development in transaction processing and HPC schedulers. I have presented papers at several international conferences in the U.S. and Europe.

I have written over 15 patents in the U.S. and Europe on hardware and software designs.

So I have been around the block.

It turns out that the same problems and occur over and over at many different levels. For instance, HW CPU cache coherency shares a lot of design issues with distributed database systems.

I have spent a lot of time locating seminal books on the topics which relate to the work that I do. I just purchased Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann published by O’Reilly. Books like that come once every 4 or 5 years, but they are really special. (There are boatloads of books which aren’t worth the paper, but that’s another topic.)

Thus, a generalized education will equip a student to face the next round of problems. While taking classes on Java, Python, and JEE will equip them to deal with technology which will probably be replaced in 20 years.

Send me a private message if you would like further information.