There used to be a system of education here in the UK called vocational colleges (or sometimes courses) where you would do exactly this, prepare for work in the industry - and industry would be involved in helping shape the curriculum, giving students work experience etc.
This has fallen out of favour a lot, it still exists for trades activities like plumbing, electrician, bricklaying/building etc. but you won't find a software engineering course
Recently the government tried to bring back "apprenticeships" but this was abused very hard by retailers to pay shelf stackers 1/2 the minimum wage.
isn't that the price you pay for using any online sharing thingy? you gain easy sharing+access (because it's "on someone else's computer"), but lose control. if it makes information easily accessible (contrast with xeroxing paper docs), i think it's a decent trade-off.
it'd be nice if we weren't reliant on one service provider, but idk any good alternatives.
> those students aren’t prepping to work for Google.
i don't get this part. would you criticize the widespread usage of MS Office as "those people aren't prepping to work for Microsoft"?
At any time, you can download your google docs data and have it locally. You can convert it to word/excel formats.
This makes anything you are trying to argue completely irrelevant.
If they basically forced you to keep your data in their proprietary format online-only, then maybe you have an argument.. but since this is not true you are grasping at straws here.
Like, I personally agree with you, but then I also think that we don't have the right to define it as such. There's plenty of people who think that the main goal of a university(at least in scientific/engineering fields) should be to prepare people for working in the industry.
Equally, I see nothing wrong with courses which are specifically designed for this. I myself have finished a "Games Engineering" masters which boasted about close links to the industry, and over 90% hire rate in the industry after - and I got exactly what was promised. I don't see any issue with that personally. I also have friends who had their entire PhDs funded by companies like Red Hat, because they were researching things done in collaboration with them. Also don't have any issue here, and that made sure that my friends not only paid nothing for their PhDs, they were actually pretty well compensated throughout.
I think the perspective changes when you have to pay for university. My sister has a degree in film making from a British university, which she paid nealy £60k(!!!!) for, and her chances of employment in the industry are nearly zero. Where I'm from(Poland)_all higher education is free, and then I have no problem with degrees not correlating with employment(but then maybe on the other hand, as a Polish tax payer, maybe I would prefer that they did, otherwise why are we paying these people to study with no employment prospects afterwards. Again, I don't really think that but I know many people do).