> I'd dropped out of college because I'd failed calculus - twice - and was basically told I'd never graduate without passing calculus

One of the biggest pieces of BS is forcing calculus on people who have neither the need nor the desire to know calculus.

CS majors, for example, would be better served by a Discrete Math course instead of calculus: That's formal logic (first-order predicate logic, in specific) along with combinatorics and big-O notations (big-O, big-Theta, big-Omega, etc.), and some emphasis on writing proofs. If they later decide to learn calculus, they can either take freshman formula-grind calculus or Real Analysis, which is where you learn where stuff like the chain rule actually comes from by deriving calculus from first principles. Real Analysis is a lot more interesting.

Gradually getting back to my point, the focus on calculus is outdated and at odds with any STEM program that isn't exclusively or even primarily about creating civil engineers and physicists.