I think your question is full of good intentions, but I think most contemporary university educations are missing the point most of the time, and as such, I find that your real question is in your text body, rather than in the title.
The point of education is to inspire people to live up to their potentials. This is not done by inventing an algorithm of the optimum path to take, but through faculty's hard work with pedagogy, willing the students to see the bigger picture.
When I teach students, I always try to enthuse the students with the topic by drawing parallels to previous experience, applications in parallel fields of knowledge, philosophy and epistemology.
I sorely missed the big picture during my time as an undergraduate. The teachers seemed distant, annoyed at having to teach and unwilling to step out of their respective comfort zones of their areas of specialism.
If you are looking to become a great university for undergraduate students, while you ought to be experts in what matters for this industry, also care about educating your teachers for teaching. That would be the main take-away from my answers, if anything -- to make your students enthusiastic about the world and helping their imaginations dream up how they can improve the world through their chosen field of study!
I know that answers should mostly be short and to the point, but this is a topic which I care greatly for. Let's see if I can distil some anti-patterns of teaching of my former uni:
- Lecturers could not wait to get back to their research outside and away from the lecture.
This led to the lecturers being perceived as bored or simply not caring what people learnt. Some lecturers even acted in a hostile manner when any questions were being asked, because they felt it disrupted them.
Lecturers did not get rewarded for good teaching. Or at least not punished for bad teaching -- those who were excellent teachers would get rewarded, but there were no draw-backs of not giving a damn.
- Lecturers knew nothing of the state-of-the-art.
Lecturers only knew their personal state of the art, so they only taught that. Potentially they were up to speed with other academia, but never up to speed about what the software industry was actually using.
- Lecturers were too copy-left
I guess this comes a bit with the field of academia - the state finances it, so there's no point in making things commercial. Faculty feed their fat asses by means of students' loans and state sponsorship, without learning about the industry around them. They state that at some point their research turns into commercial software and as such they are contributing back some of the vast amount of money they get off the state, but in reality they are free to choose pretty much anything that catches their interest without regards for who is paying, nor who is gaining utility from it -- note that utility is not only in monetary terms, but defined in a softer sense. The point of universities is to optimize what amounts to Pareto-efficiency/Kaldo-Higgs efficiency of the society, not to become departmental fiefdoms.
Many times, a commercial entity had already a superior solution to what was being discussed, or at least a real-world implementation of it. One example where this was the case was during discussions of proving software correct, when Microsoft had had a working operating system based on the same principles of axiomatic proofs (Singularity), being discussed, for two years, in the public, at the time of discussion, but the lecturers knew nothing of it, nor cared to learn about it. If I mentioned it to them, they shrugged and didn't care. One of the lecturers were so immature and self-absorbed that the whole class of 100 students sat in complete silence while he ranted for an hour, then left, without asking any questions.
Not to mention the obvious hatred towards anything not unix/copyleft or free. No pragmatism there (best tool for the job like in ALT.Net/Software Craftsmanship manifesto, etc), but rather elitism.
- Lecturers and post-grads somehow thing of UGs as inferior
In Sweden during gymnasium (in other words: sixth form college), perhaps because it was a good gymnasium, researchers got invited to discuss their findings from a layman's perspective. For example, one researcher discussed the problems of accurately simulating protein folding saying how the actual folding process could be likened to a funnel where a solution placed tangential to the surface would always progress inwards/downwards.
While this wasn't a very rigorous description of the process, it made me interested in the subject of computation.
In England where I did my UG years, on the other hand, one often got scowled at by researchers for trying to understand what they were doing, either with the sentiment of "you are too young and not far enough into the education to even entertain a hope of grasping the simplest of principles of my work" or plainly "go away, you are annoying me".
