I think they should split university courses - a course about parsing (no need to even mention compilers) and a course about compilers that starts from an AST. Many the former a requirement and the latter an elective.
It gives you an AST you can assume is valid and has you do the work to rename variables and methods. Then it gives you an AST and has you develop your target code (in the case of the specific class, LLVM IR). Then the AST is checked for valid semantics. Then the course has you check a source program for syntactic validity and generate an AST.
It gives people the advantage of understanding what the AST is for on a deeper level before deciding how to represent it. I think this sort of class and a separate parsing class could be stellar together.
My university did that... sort of. There was a required "Theory of Computation" course using the Ullman & Hopcroft textbook "Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation". A newer textbook could also be Sipser's "Introduction to the Theory of Computation".
