[ryandrake]

Not sure how it is today, but for me in the mid-90s, there was a lot of interest in software and computer degrees, but the curriculum was sufficiently difficult to filter out the posers. I went to a huge state school, and our first year Comp Sci class was, not exaggerating, an auditorium-sized lecture of 1000+ students dreaming about becoming a Microsoft Millionaire. Most of the students didn't make it through hello_world.c. We also had requirements like Linear Algebra, Matrix Theory, MOSFETs, Linear Systems, and Signal Processing. The electives were all very tough, too. By the time we graduated, there were about 30-40 of us. So, there was a lot of interest, but most didn't actually graduate with the major.