Just wanted to point out that it was my original intention to express a more nuanced view regarding the role of math in computer science both in industry and academia but decide to save that for another day after I realized the professors' arguments were very interesting on their own and that they deserve to stand on their own.
Part of the reason I went through such great lengths to analyze the multitude of arguments from the entire thread was to point out that they were missing the bigger picture, which I'm hoping to discuss in a later post.
Also wanted to point out that top U.S. universities do not offer associate degrees in software engineering, in most cases it's a course or two lumped under cs; if you want to go in to software engineering you must go through the cs curriculum that is related/implied by my last point where the professors were concerned that just the image of computer science as a mathy subject scare students away from participating in the computing industry.