Are you telling me you want us to still be quibbling over which is more efficient, "binary trees versus modified bubble sort"? Implementing hash tables?

The complexity of our problems have grown. It's called progress.

But of course they still teach us that stuff in school, just as aspiring physicists still go through classical, Newtonian concepts before starting their research in quantum mechanics. But by no means is this generation of physicists less capable just because they've moved past studying the nature of gravity.

This is not always true. I can't speak for other universities, but ours does not pay a dime to Microsoft for licenses supplied by the MSDNAA program. We only incur the costs of hosting the CD/DVD images of the software they provide for students to download.

Microsoft has an incentive for providing their software to university students--specifically, their Visual Studio and Windows Server brands. They will license these out for nothing if it gets them educated, motivated developers, much like they often hand out Visual Studio disks at conventions and tech talks just for attending.

Might not work as a direct substitute, but Python also has an extensive online tutorial under the documentation section of their website, http://www.python.org./