The french "engineering schools" are actually considered the elite scientific education in France. They are infinitely more selective than universities and provide much better job options. Equating french engineering school with US community college makes no sense whatsoever, and saying "a university graduate has more job options than a graduate from those other schools" is plain wrong (in France).

well, i am not trying to claim that they are equivalent, but that they could be, or should.

i was not aware that the french engineering schools were at that level.

so in fact that means that france has achieved what everyone else should aspire to.

they are not equivalent, and they couldn't be, shouldn't be, and won't be. Most engineering schools recruit after two years of highly theoretical education in mathematics and physics (classes préparatoires) and the level in mathematics and physics is much higher than the undergraduate level in the university. You're being misled by the term "engineering school" which makes it sound like this is some practical / technical education, when it's in fact the exact opposite.

The industry expects programming skills, yes. But a lot of the missing semester skills (how to use git, how to write unit tests, how to write a design doc) are very easily taught on the job. Topics like data structures and operating systems are more difficult to teach on the job because they do not come up every day and therefore do not get repeated practice.

I don't think it is unreasonable to have alternatives to the university education model. But I also think that employers would be very foolish to demand that junior engineers have prior experience with git.

Teaching the "missing semester skills" are indeed learned by most people on the job because they are often site specific because everyone is self taught in them, so the cycle continues.

Becoming a senior engineer usually takes lots of on the job experience, one can't really train for it. A PHd helps, but unless it models the same shared industrial scale codebase, there will be gaps in the schooling vs a large engineering org.

One could get a masters (extra year in the US) in the missing semester skills. Learning to refactor could be a 5 credit course. Same thing with testing, could cover property testing, ci/cd pipelines, incremental repeatable builds, fault injection, gradient descent, rollback, fuzz testing, formal methods, proof systems etc. but in a practical way.

It is one thing to know about a skill vs having actually used the skill to solve a problem. It takes years to actually learn how to use Git well. Same for most processes and tools, a formal education in those areas would accelerate the state of the whole industry.

Two things should probably happen. One for early education and second for post hs.

The whole k-12 education system should get more rigorous, front load the early education and get everyone on a rock solid foundation. Like everyone exiting 5th grade can read the international phonetic alphabet and are fluent in a second language at at-least the 2nd grade level.

For post highschool academic education, the credit hours to graduate should be extended or be made variable depending on the degree. Some "hard" science degrees already do this, by declaring 5 credit courses as 3 credits. Still 90 credit hours to complete but the difficulty is much higher. Basically the 4 year degree is now the 5+ year degree. This is ok.

We have or did have a huge commercial market for computer jobs in the "code camp/school" space. All these new participants showed up because there was a huge need for these skills. They mostly teach the missing semester stuff and build a ton of context so they don't get shunned at the new job for the huge gaps in their knowledge.

I think the commercial votec school system does need to get some form of accreditation.

I will not discuss the levels of foolishness by employers in their hiring practices. Utter insanity.

In France, an engineering school graduate has far more prospects than a university graduate at masters level. Completely different systems. Schools are for engineering, universities are for science.