I work at the University. This is the reality. You keep computers working without updates till they stop working and backups are lost.
Then I know someone who's a researcher at the university, and they have no funds to buy computers, so she provides her own and is quite incensed about it. And the money for refactoring and updating stuff is zero. For any lab equipment connected to a computer, the computer is as old as the equipment.
And then everything in between.
In my view the vast majority of scientists using Python are using it at a level where they could practically switch to Python 3 just by cleaning up their print statements.
And an amusing anecdote... by the time my thesis project was in full swing, the OS that I had been using (MS-DOS running hardware that I had built) was largely obsolete. But I sure as hell wasn't going to change horses in mid stream, so I persisted with the old stuff.
Universities need to keep up to date rather then just saying "but it still works" and sticking there head in the sand ignoring what the rest of the industry is doing to move forward around them.
Schools should be teaching the fundamentals of programming, which apply across languages. I don't want to say "the language doesn't matter", because COBOL would be a poor choice, but Python 2 vs 3? Whatever.
and lets not forget that with python 2 not being supported anymore, even getting it installed and running in the fist place is going to start getting harder and harder.
So what? Students should not be paying tens of thousands of dollars to learn tooling that will be obsolete within a decade anyway.
All else being equal, sure, start kids off with the most recent tools available. But it wouldn't be near the top of my priority list.
University is not a boot camp.
The fact that universities are apparently incapable of learning such a basic life skill is terrifying. It's akin to an auto mechanic who doesn't know how to perform an oil change.
I just finished a Graduate diploma at a local University, a single subject had over 100 students each paying $3500 to do that subject alone yet the Uni tried to claim they didn't have the staff/resources to update that course (that was 10 hours of face to face class time) each session. I find it hard to imagine that running that one session cost even a fraction of the $350,000 paid by students to run such that there was nothing left over to fund resourcing for updating the materials.
That $350,000 goes towards staff, facilities, and research projects.
If they had the choice between funding new cutting-edge research or migrating some obscure legacy code, the new research will always win. It’s not even a hard choice.
Which is sad, really, because we really could use more people who can do that. In fact, I really wish that every CS program had a requirement to take an existing code base and do material work on it; it's not like anybody's going to graduate from school and then get hired to do greenfield development, so it'd be kind of nice if they were actually trained for the things that they're going to do in practice.