@herberts asked me why I had to leave Télécom Bretagne for Cranfield University to learn about scalability, and I couldn't answer that in 140 chars.
First when I say I left, I just mean I took a double degree during my 3rd year, and I didn't have a choice anyway since school policy makes it mandatory to spend at least a semester abroad. Also, do not misunderstand me: I love the school, I chose to go there instead of "better ranked" schools for a reason. The location is great, and school life too (I couldn't say the same about Cranfield).
As for lessons, I am happy about what I learnt in most department. My problem is with Computer Science & Software Engineering, and it is probably not specific to Télécom Bretagne but the same in most French engineering schools. French engineering students spend their first two years of higher education learning general stuff so most students who enter Télécom Bretagne know nothing at all about CS. The way the curriculum is made, they will have CS classes for at most 3 semesters before they graduate.
Maybe I am wrong but I don't think you can teach CS well in less than 18 month. Very motivated pupils could learn CS by themselves but academic teaching just takes more time. It just felt like CS teachers at Télécom Bretagne, some of which are excellent, know that and have "given up". They just teach basic OOP and sprinkle more interesting things in such little quantity that those students who had already heard about them learn nothing new and others don't understand nor remember them. They actually teach more about things like algorithms, data structures and low-level programming in the other three technical departments than in CS.
Now I am not saying I know how to do any better. The problem is mainly with the audience.
As for me, I wanted to learn about difficult topics like Cloud Computing, distributed data storage, and that was obviously not possible in Brest. Not sure there is an engineering school in France that teaches this kind of things, actually (maybe now, but last year?). So I picked up the opportunity that was offered to my by the school's International service and went to Cranfield, where the technical level is definitely higher. Now I'm back in France and working on the back-end of a Cloud-based image search engine so I guess it worked.
But I still would have loved to attend your talk, @herberts ;)