If you divide the sticker price of my college education by the number of class hours, the implication is that one hour of instruction costs about $80. In the harsh light of that fact, I would still have paid a few hundred bucks to learn CVS or SVN in college rather than learning bad habits. My first two jobs programming (academic and quasi-academic) didn't use source control, and I kept my bad habits until I got into industry and was dragged kicking and screaming into professionalism. I think source control should be taught starting the first day of CS101. If the exact tool changes in 5 years, oh well, you can learn the new tool. But it should be an automatic, instantaneous, ingrained part of your process from day one. (Ditto IDEs and basic Unix system administration.)
Four courses that have been worth substantially more than $80 an hour to me: Japanese, Technical Writing, AI (mostly because it really should have been called Introduction To Scripting Languages), and (weirdly enough) my single course on assembly. That was entirely due to a twenty minute discussion with my professor that had an effect on me, the general gist of which was "Any performance problem can be solved by caching, if you do it right." I haven't programmed a single line of assembly in my professional career but every time a performance problem comes up I cache and the problem goes away. (And is replaced by a cache expiration problem.)
I think source control should be taught starting the first day of CS101.
I agree with the general sentiment but I think that instead this should be taught during the first time students need to work in large groups (more than 2 people). Without suffering from not having version control, no one will care. Now, I'm not saying that we should only focus on what people think they need as students, but if there is a way to force them to understand the value of something, all the better.
Four courses that have been worth substantially more than $80 an hour to me: Japanese, Technical Writing, AI (mostly because it really should have been called Introduction To Scripting Languages), and (weirdly enough) my single course on assembly. That was entirely due to a twenty minute discussion with my professor that had an effect on me, the general gist of which was "Any performance problem can be solved by caching, if you do it right." I haven't programmed a single line of assembly in my professional career but every time a performance problem comes up I cache and the problem goes away. (And is replaced by a cache expiration problem.)