wrt, to your fundemental topics, I'm not convinced companies are hiring BS grads for those fields, nor do they come up in "practice" all the time. Distributed systems are notoriously hard to get right, to the point you should almost always be using an off the shelf solution. If you find yourself in the industry, 1-2 years after college, needing to build and deploy a distributed systems, I don't really have confidence that "15-440 Distributed Systems" would adequately prepare you to launch a production system that actually serves customers. In Distributed Systems specifically, I believe experience trumps education as most (popular) systems now predicated on running some nodes in an expendable cloud over a flaky network. I can't really imagine a company hiring fresh faced BS grads to build compilers and distributed systems, even if they did attend an elite school.

If you know developers writing their own distributed system, chances are they are wasting their time, BS or no.