This isn't really any of my business, but here's my 2 cents. I think it's
a little counterproductive to toss around loaded labels like "elitist" in
a discussion like this. If you disagree, disagree on substance.
Way back when I was an undergraduate at another university far far away,
some of the engineering school workstation accounts came with . in the
path by default - worse yet, at the beginning of the path. It took about 2
weeks for enterprising students to start littering the machines with
trojan 'ls' programs, and it caused no end of nightmares for those of us
who had to clean up the mess. It also resulted in students losing work and
losing privacy.
Why not just make a ~/bin or ~/homework directory in /etc/skel and put
that in the path? As long as students do their work there, they'll be able
to execute their programs, without worrying about potential disaster if
they're cd'ed to /tmp or to someone else's directory.
miguel