> the parts of a CS background that have actually been useful in my everyday coding life
Someone fresh out of school would have no idea how to discern that from anything else in the wide, wide world of CS unless they have experience working in the industry (from, say, a summer internship or co-op terms).
Hell, mastery of basic DVCS operations (say, git pull, git commit, git merge, although equivalent experience with hg, perforce, or TFS would be reasonable) isn't a guarantee, even if students spent four months in a lab "using" such a tool.
The people who "do best" in university get told by their professors to become graduate students. Most are not optimized to teach the skills you seek -- if you picked a random fresh graduate and they happened to have those skills, it's probable that either they taught themselves or they learned them at another employer.
Someone fresh out of school would have no idea how to discern that from anything else in the wide, wide world of CS unless they have experience working in the industry (from, say, a summer internship or co-op terms).
Hell, mastery of basic DVCS operations (say, git pull, git commit, git merge, although equivalent experience with hg, perforce, or TFS would be reasonable) isn't a guarantee, even if students spent four months in a lab "using" such a tool.
The people who "do best" in university get told by their professors to become graduate students. Most are not optimized to teach the skills you seek -- if you picked a random fresh graduate and they happened to have those skills, it's probable that either they taught themselves or they learned them at another employer.