Is it the students? How many people are going into CS because they've had a taste of programming somewhere outside of school and decided they want to be a software engineer, and how many of them just get into CS because they heard that CS grads have very good employment prospects (Low unemployment, high salaries)? Anecdotally, I can tell you that during my senior project for my CS degree, someone in my group admitted to hating coding, but was pushed into CS by family, and that he couldn't code worth a damn.

Or is it the schools? In my school, the first two years were much heavier on the code, where the latter two years were heavier on CS theory. But in both cases, the quizzes and tests were on syntax and other things that could be answered with a short answer, or they were multiple choice. The only time your coding ability was tested was in the homework, which is easily plagiarized with Google and Stack Overflow.

Tests were basically all theory. Practical knowledge came from labs and everyone did the majority of their homework on lab computers that had no network connection. Not everyone was a rockstar of course, but as I recall pretty much everyone was at least a passable programmer in the end. Of course that was the early 90s...

CS contains more disciplines than just software engineering. Some people get into CS but have no interest/knack for coding: it just doesn't "click" for them the way it does for others, and they will fallback to rote memorization/copy-pasting from StackOverflow to scrape over the line.

I did Calculus 1 & 2 as part of my CS; but today, I don't think I'd be able to solve the FizzBuzz of Calculus, Linear Algebra, (or even the finer points of OS process schedulers if I'm being completely honest). I'd be alarmed if Software Engineering graduates weren't able to solve FizzBuzz

Uber's hiring pipeline was a mess.

Community colleges serve a smaller area, typically one county and its neighbors. Community colleges often have a much higher emphasis on trades and job prep. They will often offer more 2 year associate degrees, trade certifications and less 4 year degrees. They are rarely universities.

In the USA Community College can mean a private or publicly funded 2 year university, college or trade school. A state university is pubicly funded and can be a community colleges. See the New York State SUNY system for an example. There is also the New York City CUNY system which is publicly funded by the city at the local level.

I went to "Queensborough Community College", a CUNY university in NYC. So I tend to define "community college" as a publicly funded 2 year university/college.

Community College: no application, no traditional degrees, no prior learning required. Often vocation in focus. Adult classes. Anyone can attend (dropouts, elderly, anyone). You even just sign up for individual classes. You, 8589934591, could likely sign up for an online class next semester/quarter. Some are highly regarded, Foothill College in SV for example.

If you need a junior .Net Enterprise developer to write WPF apps in C# to talk to a SQL Server using LINQ, then it is very likely that the student from the community college, who has spend 2 years focusing very practically on learning exactly those technologies, will be able to perform better out of the gate compared to the university student whose education has a broader and more theoretical base.

In theory the University student should be 'better' in the long run since they have a deeper understanding of the field as a whole and should be able to solve harder problems and more quickly transition to new technologies, but that is of course up for debate. And most companies don't need to solve many hard problems, they need a WPF app that can talk to SQL Server using LINQ.