Well, GenEng courses require a lot of time and I would rather get an A in my CS course than get an A in Civil Engineering 201 (instead of a B+). My schedule sometimes involves tradeoffs (i.e., two required courses held at the same time), what's sad about that?

What's sad is that you apparently treated college as a vocational-training school. That's fairly normal these days, but still not something I like to see happen.

No I think that's a false comparison. Simply because I favor my computer science classes over others when they compete doesn't mean I don't receive a breadth education -- it simply means I'm a computer science major. Doing nothing but computer science would be treating college as vocational school, but that's not what I said. Instead I said that sometimes I sacrificed high grades in other courses for a high grade in computer science.

In addition, there's only a loose relationship between getting a very good grade in a course (as opposed to a good-mediocre one) and getting breadth knowledge out of the course. To believe otherwise would be to satisfy tendencies of grade inflation. For example, an A in a course was originally supposed to mean an excellent performance beyond expectation. To get an A in every single course should signal that you are either 1) extraordinarily dedicated to your school work and extremely bright or 2) the school is handing out an A not for extraordinary work, but only good work. In light of this, the most reasonable grade distribution for a bright, dedicated student would be a very strong (hopefully A level) grade distribution in their area of specialization with a good but not as extraordinary distribution in their breadth subjects.

It was interesting that you noted me as focusing on CS like vocational training when I actually take pride in my choice of courses as true liberal arts education. For example, while I am an engineer CS major, I will have taken enough courses in the physics and philosophy departments to almost qualify for a minor in the fields. Simply because I am unable to dedicated my time to all of my varied classes at once does not mean that I do not participate in number of different liberal arts.