There are, of course, exceptions, but programming in industry is typically a design job. Your focus is on designing an infrastructure for the application that will allow it to be functional and maintainable, and survive massive refocusing of scope without determent to the prior two points. Things like compilers, HTTP proxies, and OS kernels are plugged into the infrastructure, not written as part of it.
Your concern, as an industry programmer, is not whether merge sort of bubble sort is the right algorithm for your problem; you will just hand that off to the built-in sort function. Your concern is whether or not MVC is the right design pattern for your application. Again, there are exceptions, but that is fairly typical of the average programming job.
So while you might pick up some design skills during your study in a CS degree, it is not the focus of the program. That is where the meme comes from.
I'm not sure if that's a legit complaint. Can stuff like that be taught adequately in a course or is it something you pick up by "just doing" it?
A lot of classes where you program your ass off force you to make design decisions, some explicitly as part of the assignment and some implicitly. Isn't that valuable? What would a "design based" curriculum look like?
Your concern, as an industry programmer, is not whether merge sort of bubble sort is the right algorithm for your problem; you will just hand that off to the built-in sort function. Your concern is whether or not MVC is the right design pattern for your application. Again, there are exceptions, but that is fairly typical of the average programming job.
So while you might pick up some design skills during your study in a CS degree, it is not the focus of the program. That is where the meme comes from.