Interesting side discussion.

I do thing cube123 read your post, and I do think a valid conclusion from reading your post is that you have missed the point of what a CS program is.

I suspect that this comes from your own history, and part from the way in which CS 'grew up' as a discipline.

The point of your posting is that being employed as a programmer, and learning programming is not what a Computer Science degree is about. Try getting an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering, its similar in that you have lots of theory on lots of things but little practical experience.

The leap you make which causes me to discard your argument is this one, "but this isn't really about you, it's about the mismatch between what university CS programs do and what people and society really want or need." You have taken on the role of speaking for society and yet you haven't successfully made a case that you can accurately represent what society wants.

You can make an argument that there is a need for a training program between high school and employment that teaches people how to write programs to solve problems. You can call that Computer Engineering, Applied Programming, Programming Technology, what ever. Such programs exist, both in the 'for profit' University world and elsewhere. You can argue that such programs should be structured more along the various processes for producing reliable, testable code, and you do some of that in your education project (always great to put your money where your mouth is like that).

But the opportunity to teach folks who 'just want to code' does not disqualify CS as being a valid course of study, just like 'Accounting' doesn't disqualify 'Mathematics' as a course of study. So your central thesis that 'more universities should shut down their CS programs' fails the 'sniff' test.

Now if you said 'More universities should offer applied programming type degrees' and used your points about how it is what many people want to do. That is a reasonable conversation to have, do we want to elevate what have been things like ITT Technical College programs into a more general purpose degree program? Something between 'JavaSchool' and 'CS' ? I can see arguments for and against.

But if you are going to blurt out things like "Most undergraduates and professional actually want to learn applied software engineering, not 'computer science'" you really should try to develop some foundation for that claim. What evidence do you offer that this claim is valid? Some study on college exit exams, some survey of recent CS graduates? A self selecting poll on Reddit? Its all well and good to wonder if most folks just want to code, but to use it as a claim in your argument that Universities should restructure their CS programs, and expecting your readers to 'buy in' to that requires that you provide some basis for making that claim.

Your post makes a bunch of claims, four of them in big bold font, for which your provide no supporting evidence or structure at all around why the reader should believe them. Because of that your message is lost.

I agree with you that it is an interesting topic and as we've moved 'programming' into a more general skill requirement based on the explosion of 'programmable' devices, you might be more successful making the argument that we need to offer a better high school programming class. (much like Typing was offered in the 70's as a way to provide a generally useful skill to High School students).