[sangfroid_bio]

It varies from place to place, the better schools generally offer a more rigorous combination of CS and Biology, the reason why it may appear applied is mostly because Bioinformatics offered on MOOCS like EdX tend to only offer courses that fall under its specific subject code, giving the impression the entire field is about string manipulation. This is the same with other interdisciplinary subjects like mechatronics, they are generally a combination of two majors but courses exclusive to the particular interdisciplinary subject are lot more rare. Computational biology is a lot more than string processing and crunching through PDEs (synthetic biology), there is a tremendous amount of machine learning used in the current state of the art proteomics and drug synthesis research.