[AnimalMuppet]

> The Computer Science program was part of the College of Science and Mathematics at my university (not the School of Engineering).

And what we need is for CS and Software Engineering to split, with Software Engineering being part of the School of Engineering. (Similar to the way Chemistry is split from Chemical Engineering.) And we need Software Engineering to be ten times as large as Computer Science. (Of the people who get CS degrees, 90% of them are going to work as software engineers, not as computer scientists.)

[freetime2]

I actually really value my CS education, and think a rigorous mathematical education is useful for any analytical profession. Both in terms of being proficient at math, which has tons of practical applications, and for developing analytical and abstract reasoning.

I’m curious what sorts of things would you like to drop from a CS degree, and add to a computer engineering degree?

[AnimalMuppet]

It's mostly what I'd add.

To me, software engineering is about creating larger-scale software that adequately meets the need, and doing so as efficiently as possible - which is not to say that it's efficient. When there's six steps in the communication path between the need and the programmer, how do you minimize the amount of time the programmer is implementing the wrong thing? This is a far bigger problem than choice of language or algorithm, but I doubt you'll ever find it in a CS curriculum. I might even say it's the fundamental problem of software engineering - or perhaps of software engineering management.

Along those lines, they should teach clarity of writing technical information, and ability to read less-than-stellar technical information.

"That adequately meets the need" - that's not perfection. How do you evaluate and triage bugs? How do you manage the bug list? For that matter, how do you even know what bugs you have? Testing strategy should be part of a software engineering curriculum.

Working with a version control system. They might get that in a CS degree, but probably around the edges and by accident. For a software engineering degree, they should get it in some depth and on purpose.

I don't know what I'd cut to make room for that kind of thing. But I think that kind of thing needs to be there for an actual software engineering degree.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

> a rigorous mathematical education is useful for any analytical profession

This is already the case with classical engineering degrees. The majority of undergraduate engineering coursework is science, calculus, or some form of applied mathematics specific to the discipline you're majoring in.