A new programmer can just use a git UI like the Github app. It abstracts everything away and leaves you with the obvious benefit of being able to commit a succession of snapshots that represent logical groupings of changes.

I haven’t used cli git since uni. GUI is better for basically everything except for a few rare and advanced commands.

Yet that is still just one more impediment to getting someone off the ground. You are already throwing programming concepts (variables, and loops, and conditionals, oh my!) + big scary IDE + likely first-time command line, etc onto their plate. Invoking yet another weirdo program into the paradigm is not helping a beginner.

Jeremy Howard (of Fastai fame) has a good analogy that we do not make people sit in a classroom for a semester to learn all of the theory of baseball. Instead, we give them a bat and a ball, and layer on the instructions of how the game works. You can get a good approximation of the game with just a couple minutes of instruction and refine the understanding from there.

if someone is at that level they are learning the language and do tutorial or student projects where version control doesn't yet matter. which is fine. once they have done a few of those, it's time to introduce basic version control.

I managed to finish college without a real VCS. Would it have made some things easier? Sure, but again, add it to the pile of things I needed to learn and did not have enough time to study.

as far as college is expected to prepare students for work, version control should absolutely be part of that.

i don't expect a fresh graduate to be a skilled git user but if the nature of development at work is substantially different from what the student learned at school, then they will have a much harder time adjusting.

they should at least be familiar with all the concepts that they will encounter in a junior job and not be faced with having to relearn a completely different development process.