It's niche, but I really think F# is the best language to learn first. Not all of F#, but the basics of let, records, tuples, recursion... All that's required is FSI (the interactive interpreter). You can even fetch dependencies from Nuget inside a script, so there's less setup than Node or Python.
Learning these esoteric languages seems like the opposite of what you want to do if your goal is to create employable engineers in as little time as possible.
I think intuition suggests that but in practice it would be extremely effective. Almost every student I've encountered ends up doing it the long way anyway when the short way doesn't work for them.
Elm would probably work too.