When I was in college, I just wanted to build stuff, ideally games, but whatever was fine. I had no illusions that I would be writing compilers, writing OSes or building chips, even though I took courses on those subjects. A lot of the course catalog was on esoteric theory, like proving theorems, lambda calculus, early 80s cellular automata (what we called Huffmanetics, as Huffman taught those classes); I avoided those classes like the plague, although it was kind of dumb in hindsight. I wish I had studied more math and theory...

What they did not teach was how to code. You were just expected to learn that as needed on your own. What I needed perhaps was some kind of engineering major, as opposed to computer science, but that wasn't available at my college at that time. And even if it was, it wouldn't really have taught us how to be a professional developer, it would have just given us an overview of various topics.

Maybe you are arguing that we need such a program? I'm not sure. "How to be a professional programmer" courses do exist, at boot camps. People here on HN don't seem to think they are a good idea though.