"The OP's complaint seems to be mediocre students, not the BSCS. Don't eliminate the BSCS, just have higher standards for students."

I think you've struck the heart of it here. Unfortunately, while "enforce higher standards" sounds nice, given the incentives involved, it's not realistically going to happen. There are plenty of smart students out there who would do well in a rigorous university program. There are also many less-qualified students who are willing to pay university-education prices for vocational educations as long as they get sheepskins after four years or so. The universities have discovered that they can cater to the latter without losing the business of the former, thus raking in considerably more cash, so of course that's what they're doing. This is probably more true for liberal arts programs than any other curriculum, but it's affecting everything.

This argument has come up a lot on HN lately, and it usually breaks down into two camps: those who think that the higher education system is being diluted to death, and those who say, "I just finished my degree, and I received an excellent education." Then come the anecdotes saying, "I've been trying to hire recent graduates, but they're all lazy, self-centered, entitled, incompetent, gormless whiners," while others respond with, "I just hired some recent graduates and was overwhelmed by how smart and driven they all were; I had a hard time narrowing the field down to make job offers." Finally, a bunch of cherry-picked studies and statistics are thrown out by both sides to support their positions.

Here's my personal concept of what's really happening: university curricula are being watered down to cater to less-qualified students, but this process is not YET having a perceptible impact on the most qualified students because they are doing what university students are supposed to be doing: extending their learning well beyond the classroom. So far the universities are managing to have their cake and eat it: they are selling watered-down diplomas to under-qualified students while simultaneously providing a good learning environment for qualified students. However, I think that those qualified students are still being hurt by the change. They may say, "I think I received a great education," but they have no way of knowing if their education would have been even better if it had been optimized for them instead of targeted at the lowest common denominator. Also, I wonder how long the universities can continue to run these schizophrenic curricula before something gives.

My understanding of the author's underlying intent was to find a way for universities to teach a rigorous curriculum to the smart students without driving out the less-qualified students, because any solution that drives out the less-qualified simply will not be adopted in the real world. His answer was to create two curricula: one for the people who actually belong in college, and one for people who just want a vocational education and a piece of vellum. You could apply this model to almost any field of university study. I think that there is a definite need for vocational education of this sort, and I don't think that universities should be providing it. However, they've discovered that they can make a lot of money doing so, so they're not going to stop. Instead of hoping that universities will abandon vocational education in favor of higher standards, we should instead look for a solution that segregates the two types of education so that universities can do both well.

I think a lot of people are focusing on his proposed breakdown, which I agree isn't quite right. He takes some subjects that do have a place in a university education and puts them strictly on the vocational side. However, his overall idea of accepting the reality that universities are providing vocational education because it is lucrative, and of separating that branch of the school from the traditional university education, is good.