My professors are far from experts in their field. In fact, I'll go as far to say that this is a point for the other side of the argument: in teaching things to myself i find myself on mailing lists and IRC where i have far more interaction with actual experts.
I was taught data structures by a guy giving powerpoints and code examples on windows XP. In 2014.
Hm that's unfortunate, and I apologize for projecting my own experiences to that of students at other colleges.
I can only speak for my own experiences, and when I was in college I worked with several people who were clearly leaders in their fields. The reason it was obvious was that I would go to talks with guest speakers and they would usually either cite a paper written by one of the professors or informally say that if you have questions about X you should probably ask a certain person in the room.
I'm at the university of Wisconsin. We're nationally ranked for graduate computer science.
The issue here is that there's quite a disconnect between our research and our teaching. They take tenured profs that aren't capable of doing research and stick them teaching undergraduates. Everyone else that is worth a damn is inaccessible to us. (I'll make one exception: Jin-Yi Cai is amazing.)
I don't even know what to say, besides that our CS program for undergraduates is kind of shit. These people are academics. There's nothing wrong with that. But it's not like they're at the head of their field either. They're at the head of the field from a decade ago maybe.
The woman teaching the intro classes, the guy teaching data structures, and the woman teaching machine programming (low level) all have been doing so for over a decade. Their classes don't change either, you can find their powerpoints and handouts from 6 years ago and they're the same damn thing, give or take some small changes like the date.
Let's look at two 500 level classes, my compilers class and the OS course. There's two profs teaching OS. One is the chair of our cs department.
Searching google for "<their name> site:gmane.org" returns no results for the non-chair OS prof and no results for my compilers prof.
The chair has a few mailing list posts, such as one on the ALSA list with an amazing subject of "help with first ALSA program, please?" And this wasn't from 1999 or anything. He was the active chair at the time of asking. It was less than 2 years ago. It's embarrassing, honestly.
As for guest speakers, that's another subject. UW has a lot of smart people around it. It's just that they're entirely separate from the 18 year olds.
Ah that's very unfortunate to hear. I certainly did have many lecturers who were not professors, and also professors who were not as great as other ones. Nevertheless, at my school at least there was never anything stopping me from just going into the office hours of a professor who wasn't teaching to talk about something. They always seemed very eager to help me with anything.
It's really unfortunate that this isn't the situation at all schools. I guess I really lucked out!
I was taught data structures by a guy giving powerpoints and code examples on windows XP. In 2014.