Ya, I have to agree. Although you may learn, it's clearly not the primary intention of a University to teach anything but your ability to do whatever it takes to score well or do publishable research.
>To keep that line of reasoning going, what is the purpose of the university, if you're supposed to learn everything on your own?
It's not that you have to learn everything on your own though, it's that if you enter a program without having some understanding of the basics, you're going to have to pay to take a bunch of remedial classes.
It'd be like going for a mathematics degree when the highest class you took in high school was algebra, where the normal degree students would be starting with Calc 3 or Differential Equations. You might be ok in the major or you might not, but you don't even know enough to start on the path at that point.
A good CS course isn't really about programming in that sense. A CS degree is to programming what a maths degree is to, say, statistics methods, or at least it should be. You are expected to learn the “hum-drum details”¹ yourself (perhaps with guidance of course) or already know some of them, with the course exploring wider or deeper concepts (the why, wherefore, and therefore, of those details).
Your maths degree probably did as much as a CS degree would have done (expanding your ability to learn, analyse & problem solve, etc.) allowing you to learn the technical details of programming on your own. CS was essentially birthed from a branch or two of mathematics, after all!
People who want/need a programming course (which is perfectly valid, I don't mean to denigrate the position in the slightest) are probably not best served by a traditional CS degree.
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[1] “hum-drum” sounds a bit too negative for what I was intending, but my brain isn't firing on all cylinders this morning and I can't think of a better term for what I was thinking there!
Not everything, but university is a big shift towards self directed learning.
Lack of understanding coming into the courses causes issues, when I started we had to delay things because some students hadn't encountered matrixes and the maths around them.
So sure, they can teach these things but it adds to what they already are trying to teach. A lowered base means less of the advanced content can be taught.
CS has always been a lot more like the arts/music than most other majors, in this regard. If you don’t come in with way more knowledge about and skill with computers than the median college-bound high school graduate, you’re gonna have a bad time.
It’s kinda shitty, but for a long time PC gaming as a gateway drug for young kids let universities just assume a fat pipeline of already-computer-savvy applicants.
