The industry will probably still be using C#, Java and JavaScript in the future - but those languages and environments evolve over time. Teaching the languages as it is used in the industry today is not preparing the students for the future. C# 3.0 is in many ways closer to ML than it is to C# 1.0.

I have seen developers complain they had to learn an unpractical "ivory tower" language like Haskell - and then the same developers get totally lost when C# introduced type inference and closures and deferred evaluation of queries.