This is pretty sad, but a lot of students tend to be only interested in whatever is applicable to the job market of present day.

However, even students do need assembly language when they take their computer architecture, operating systems and compilers classes. And some students will probably end up to do compilers or operating system work professionally at some point in their careers.

Assembly language is still a very valuable skill although a few people will ever write any code by hand. But reading assembly code as well as writing programs that emit assembly code will always stay relevant.

To be fair, students are mostly learning MIPS32. It's a 'language' great for teaching concepts while preserving the students' sanity. The fact that I have to run an emulator of an effectively dead-for-consumer use architecture to write labs hurts student satisfaction. You can't even be cheeky and use interesting, assembly dominated elements like SIMD.

The true masochists continue to x86 in the higher level courses.