I think you misunderstand. After an introductory course, it's expected that you don't need to be "taught to program" anymore. As part of your compiler class, you'll be taught about automata, regular expressions, grammars. For your projects, you might get some help with using a lexer and a grammar generator, but you should be able to figure out the "programming" parts yourself, and the teaching emphasis is on the theory.

Sure, but the vast majority of lecture time prepared you to do the programming projects, the vast majority of out-of-class time was spent on the projects, and the exams required minimal study besides having done the projects (one way of spotting cheaters was to look at the delta between understanding demonstrated out of class vs. in class).

See it this way: Each subject you finished at university, did you come at the end thinking "I learnt how to program", or did you come out thinking "I learnt how to structure a graphics pipeline"/"I learnt the tradeoffs involved in building distributed systems"/"I learnt how to structure data to make consistent updates and retrieval simple and highly performant"?

The most obvious way you apply what you learnt in those classes is by writing programs that implement those ideas (And it's also the easiest way to evaluate whether you actually learnt the concepts). But you can just as easily apply that knowledge by designing systems for somebody else to implement — somebody who presumably lacks the knowledge required to architect the system. Hammering out code is easy, and you don't need a university degree to do it. It's the rest of it that takes some study.

Where I studied, our lecturers expected us to learn the fundamentals of whichever programming language on our own time. The vast majority of our courses were focused on theory of CS/physics/maths/engineering/etc. That might explain why our class size dropped from around 100 in first year to around 15 by 4th year.

We had 5 kinds of maths; algorithms and data structures, databases, computer architecture (with assembly), English lessons, history of mathematics, operating systems, networking, and 2 programming courses: C and Java. There was very little learning by doing.

I suspect there's a fair bit of variance between CS courses, and even how we remember it.

In my case, the topics were similar to the list you give (although there were a significant number of optional classes which I filled with math, skewing it a lot), but the subjects were definitely more theory-focused than practical. Sure, there were practical classes for each subject, weekly projects, semester projects and so on, but they were secondary to the theory in both quantity and difficulty. As an example, you might deep dive into a number of networking protocols, but in the same period only implement a toy TCP/IP during a prac.

Interesting, I guess mine skewed the opposite way: the theory served the projects, and the vast majority of what you needed to know for theory-based exams, you'd pick up by doing the projects. Some lecture slide and textbook review necessary, but not a lot.

Always surprised to hear about this variance, given the general consensus that there aren't differences in quality between schools.

I'm curious, where did you attend? I started a CS degree (at UC Irvine), then stopped because I felt it was too abstract. Maybe I bailed too early.