My school (UC Davis) does something similar to this. We don’t have partnerships with tech companies, but we have some adjunct professors with years of industry experience (who may or may not have a PhD) that come in to teach classes on their specialty. As an example, I’m currently taking a databases class that focuses on implementing databases, and our professor is someone that worked at places like Oracle for years actually implementing these concepts. It’s honestly nice to have someone with extensive industry experience in the area teaching, compared to someone who’s always been in academia and hasn’t necessarily dealt with these things “in the wild”, so to speak. You learn a lot either way, but it’s kind of a breath of fresh air to focus on more real-world applications than theoretical concepts.
To a certain extent, I already see this happening. Personally, I’m generally risk-averse and in my job search I pretty much ruled out any earlier-stage startups for this reason. I know a lot of people who have a similar attitude towards startups at this point, but of course you still have the idealistic people who want to join/start the “next big thing” no matter what the risk is.
If nothing else, when someone comes on to the CS club Facebook page talking about how amazing their idea is and how they’ll change the world, people respond with a lot of skepticism unless they can give a very solid pitch. And incidentally, I’ve seen those posts pretty rarely over the past couple years compared to how often they popped up a few years ago. I don’t know what exactly could be causing that, but it’s definitely something I’ve noticed.
One thing to keep in mind is that the weeding out process does a very good job of getting would-be CS majors who just can’t cut it out of the major. But yes, the current tech boom encourages some people who could cut it to choose CS even if they otherwise wouldn’t, because that’s where the money is right now. As the starting salaries eventually fall (though they’ll probably still be pretty high), you’ll likely see fewer people that are in it solely for the cash. Not to say they’ll disappear, but it (hopefully!) won’t be as prominent.