Tomas Lozano-Perez, associate head of the electrical engineering and computer science department at MIT, says that his department has answered these questions in a way similar to Harvard.
"We believe that people need to be grounded in the fundamentals, but they get plenty of opportunity to see the practical side in summer jobs," Lozano-Perez says.
"Our focus is in training people for their whole career," he adds. "We're not going to teach you how to be a website designer or an NT system administrator, which may increase your chances of getting a job on day one, but you would regret it for the rest of your life."
At Stanford, which has long offered student entrepreneurs the opportunity to be advised by professors, the department recently added more electives to its program in such areas as computer graphics.
Jean-Claude Latombe, chair of the computer science department at Stanford, says, "technology moves very fast, so the idea is to try to anticipate what is going to be important in five years and develop the theory around that."
Still, the department there has a firm basis in theory.
"We don't want to separate theory and application," Latombe says. "We changed the curriculum last year, but not in regard to the change in the market."