I am not in a CS program myself, but I guest lecture for CS students at CMU about 2x/year, and I'm in a regular happy hour that includes CS professors from other high-tier CS schools.

Two points of anecdata from that experience:

- The students believe that the path to a role in big tech has evaporated. They do not see Google, Meta, Amazon, etc, recruiting on campus. Jane Street and Two Sigma are sucking up all the talent.

- The professors do not know how to adapt their capstone / project-level courses. Core CS is obviously still the same, but for courses where the goal is to build a 'complex system', no one knows what qualifies as 'complex' anymore. The professors use AI themselves and expect their students to use it, but do not have a gauge for what kinds of problems make for an appropriately difficult assignment in the modern era. The capabilities are also advancing so quickly that any answer they arrive at today could be stale in a month.

FWIW.

You probably should ask about a particular program because there are as many answers to your question as there are programs. Even in a single school there are often several tracks. Some are very theory and math heavy, others are more practical.

The part that hasn’t changed is being in a cohort of people like yourself and living in a community centered around a school (and again this varies from school-to-school). I had a lot of fun and met many interesting people who inspired and motivated me. It’s the fastest way to jumpstart your professional network.

I had moved from a small, boring town to a city and the semi-structured life of a student living on-campus made that transition easy and provided an instant social life.

My regret is that I didn’t take advantage of all the things I could have with respect to my electives. I wish I had taken art history or intro to film or visual arts 101 or modern literature or just about any other humanities course that was available to me.

If you want somebody to tell you to skip school, you’ll probably get that advice here too. If all you are after is the piece if paper at the end you probably should skip school or do it remotely. It’s cheaper and more concentrated but you miss the most valuable part of university life.

If entrepreneurship is your thing, you might be better off in a business program.

Get them to learn the fundamentals and understand them deeply just like they should/might have in the past.

They can do so at an accelerated rate using AI on verifiable subject matter. Use something like SRS + copilot + nano (related: https://srs.voxos.ai) to really internalize concepts.

Go deep on a project while using AI. To what extreme can they take a program before AI can't offer a working solution? Professors should explore and guide their students to this boundary.

Obligatory reference to "The illustrated guide to a Ph.D." - https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/