It's in the interest of the big companies. From what I know, some smaller schools like Harvey Mudd start off with other languages, like Scheme and Prolog.
IIRC, Harvey Mudd starts off with Python, in the intro class everyone takes. I just looked through their course listing, but I'm not 100% sure I'm thinking of the right class.
MIT switched away, though to python iirc which isn't terrible. Northeastern still uses Scheme first though.