Most CS students don't care about CS, and there's nothing
wrong with that.
Our society shouldn't look down on trade schools so much. There's too much of an importance placed on the prestige of graduating from a university, making everyone feel pressured to go to a university. These kids are wasting their time (and their parents' money) if they don't care about the material and are never going to use the material anyway. They're just there to get the rubber stamp from the university to impress their family, friends, and employers.
This emphasis on the college degree as a sign of prestige has a toxic side effect: the people who do care about the material get a diluted version of the material to better serve the university's goal of graduating as many people as possible.
I want to see more schools in the style of Digipen. Digipen offers a rigorous degree in "Real Time Interactive Simulation" -- in other words, Game Programming. They really do learn to code, and they really do learn the relevant mathematics for 3D graphics, physics simulation, etc. They probably don't sit through irrelevant courses on the theory of computation or programming language theory. Why aren't there similar programs for programming in general? You should be able to go to a trade school or university and get a solid and comprehensive degree in programming. And society should respect you for it.
Sidenote: I do think that it's possible to do this without devolving into a technology-specific curriculum. You can (and should) still teach at a conceptual level, with individual languages and APIs considered implementation details. I'm not advocating creating a degree in ".NET Programming" or "Ruby on Rails Programming" that'll be obsolete in 2 years.
While I agree that trade schools are a Good Thing ™, I have to respectfully but strongly disagree with your assertion that theory of computation and programming language semantics and implementation are somehow unimportant for any student of programming, whether vocational or theoretical.
True, it may not be terribly illuminating for a game programmer to rigorously prove historical theorems in computability or complexity theory. However, understanding the practical importance of big-O notation, the equivalence of any Turing-complete language, (as well as the lambda calculus, partially-recursive functions, etc.) and compiler design will all be of massive benefit when they're looking to actually distinguish themselves from the rest of the assembly-line game coders.
Overall, though, +1 on the idea of a solid two-year "Computer Programming" degree. Leave CS as a truly academic realm, and give those who are just looking for a solid white-collar career path a respectable path there.
I do think that Big-O notation and computational cost should be covered in a practical and intuitive way, but I'm not convinced of the utility of teaching Turing computability, programming language theory, or compiler design. You say that this "will all be of massive benefit when they're looking to actually distinguish themselves from the rest of the assembly-line game coders", but I think that anyone who wanted to get that real depth of knowledge and set themselves apart from the crowd should get a CS degree and (most importantly) continue learning on their own. What I'm envisioning for the trade school is purely what you describe as "a solid white-collar career path". I think there's a lot of people who are looking for a career that pays well and that they enjoy, but aren't interested in becoming an expert in their field, or making their career also their hobby.
To veer on a tangent -- my previous roommate went to Digipen, and he didn't find it rigorous at all. He felt it was dumbed down in the technical aspects. Has that changed in the past few years?
I don't know, I'm just going off of hearsay and the projects I've seen come out of Digipen. It's definitely less rigorous than a university program, and they're obviously exploiting the "I want to make video games!" motivation of a lot of kids. But I do think that the general model is pretty good, even if Digipen isn't an ideal example of its implementation.
Our society shouldn't look down on trade schools so much. There's too much of an importance placed on the prestige of graduating from a university, making everyone feel pressured to go to a university. These kids are wasting their time (and their parents' money) if they don't care about the material and are never going to use the material anyway. They're just there to get the rubber stamp from the university to impress their family, friends, and employers.
This emphasis on the college degree as a sign of prestige has a toxic side effect: the people who do care about the material get a diluted version of the material to better serve the university's goal of graduating as many people as possible.
I want to see more schools in the style of Digipen. Digipen offers a rigorous degree in "Real Time Interactive Simulation" -- in other words, Game Programming. They really do learn to code, and they really do learn the relevant mathematics for 3D graphics, physics simulation, etc. They probably don't sit through irrelevant courses on the theory of computation or programming language theory. Why aren't there similar programs for programming in general? You should be able to go to a trade school or university and get a solid and comprehensive degree in programming. And society should respect you for it.
Sidenote: I do think that it's possible to do this without devolving into a technology-specific curriculum. You can (and should) still teach at a conceptual level, with individual languages and APIs considered implementation details. I'm not advocating creating a degree in ".NET Programming" or "Ruby on Rails Programming" that'll be obsolete in 2 years.