I run into that kind of nonsense quite more often than I'd like. My answer is now "Show me the query plan or no deal". 99.9% of the time an index is missing somewhere.

A good CS program should teach concepts, not languages. Any object oriented language will do the job to teach inheritance, polymorphism, etc. All you need is a language that the teacher is comfortable enough to teach the concepts properly with it. I think C++ is not required if they already got the low level part with C. Still, it could be a good candidate.