About game development education

Unity is a great tool to teach game development, but so is Unreal, Godot, XNA/Monogame, Raylib, etc... Their differences is what makes it interesting to have a go with all of them (and many other tools that I could list).
The problem, that Kate points out here, is that Unity is making a big part of their business to try and not only reach more users, but to smother the others options, making them sound like a worse time investment for anyone wanting to get into game development. Just the idea of the Unity certification, and that it's now being adopted by universities is disgusting to me. With that, we are not only talking about investing your time as a student to learn something that may or may not be worth it, but also to invest more money just to get a paper which says you know some things (which, don't prove at all that you can actually make a game with the engine, by the way).
It's been a common practice in many industries, especially in the IT sector, and while I still disapprove of the whole system, it makes some sense when it's about recruiting at senior jobs with security related responsibilities. It doesn't make sense when it's to recruit junior game developers who are likely to start by editing existing features, or write/setup feature with little co-dependencies. As a recruiter, you are not mitigating any risk by recruiting someone with a Unity certification compared to someone who has none. Unless you are lazy and don't want to check the actual work they've done in the past.

I worked as a contractor trainer for Unity for a little bit a few years ago (for public paid classes, private external classes, and internal classes). Teaching is not my main job, and I wouldn't say I'm great at it, but I enjoyed bringing something new to people and helping them realise how smart they are. While I "played the game" of always introducing Unity as the great engine it is (yes I believe it is a great tool, even with its many flaws which tends to grow way too fast these days...), I stopped being interested in the work I could get when I was asked to push people toward the brand new (at the time) certification system.

I see some answers to Kate's post in the lines as (I'm exaggerating) "Yes that's why I'm glad we learn Unreal at my Uni instead, I hate Unity", but that's not the solution either, an 'Engine War' similar to the silly 'Console War' is not helping the industry (neither the development nor the education side). People will always have preferences, and it's fine but to become better developers we need to look at as many games as possible to see what's fun, we need to look at as many tools as possible to see what's efficient and useful, and it all starts when we start learning.

In my opinion, the best thing to do would be to use different tools through a whole course, and let students make their own decisions (with guidance) on what they feel is best to use for their projects. That doesn't only apply to game engine, but also to 3D tools, design tools, etc... I've seen quite a few times people not applying to jobs requiring Maya experience because their school taught them Max, while it's something they could learn on the job most of the time if they already know the fundamentals.
Obviously that's pretty difficult for schools to get started with that, it's already a big task to find teachers with enough relevant experience and interest to teach a specific tech. Finding people who can teach and adapt their course to multiple tools is going to be even harder, though maybe it'll be easier to find people interested in teaching actual game development than how to deal with invisible UI sub-Prefab because its scale is set to 0 for some reason.

I went on a long tangent, but I think if maybe people agree with the rest of what I said, they'd be more likely to agree to my conclusion:
There is no "best way to get into the game industry", and if there was one, it definitely wouldn't be to focus on learning Unity. Maybe it'll make it easier to get a job in a Web3.0 startup but I don't believe that would be the best place for you to get experience and grow as a game developer (and I understand some would disagree with me, it's fine!).

Everyone in the industry has a different story on why they got here, and how they got here, that's what is great about it. Learn as many things as you can, but more importantly learn how to learn, and how you, specifically, learn best. No one knows how long any piece of tech will be relevant, but if you can learn new things quickly and adapt, it will never be a problem. Also, this skill is transferable to literally anything in life. In my opinion that's what schools need to teach. That doesn't mean removing any engine specific class, it just means using engines as the tool they are, to teach, rather than as an end goal.

(And that wall of text, is why I don't post on social media much hah!)
@HTFClem