This is not very accurate. SCIP in [yesterday Scheme, today Python] is taught first to MIT students (where SCIP comes from). Some universities follow MIT but most do not; I don't think there are many schools actually using SCIP at the high end, maybe some lower end schools trying to emulate MIT in order to capture their greatness (rarely works from what I hear).

Example: U of Washington CSE 142 (the entry level course for one of America's better programs) starts with Java and continues that through 143.

See the other reply. I meant to say most universities that USE Scheme, use it as introduction. Not that most universities use scheme...

As you said a lot of universities use Java or C straight away.

I don't even think this is true. There are many universities with PLT faculty (DrScheme, Racket) where Scheme is used in some courses but not the intro ones.

At anyrate, I don't see how this assertion is even useful, even if it was true.

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/ss-toc2.html - Introduction Course

MIT - Introduction Course - when it wasn't python.

Can you give any examples, of where it was an advanced course?

Not in my experience. C++ is taught at my school, and a mix of C++ and Java is used at most (all?) the other schools in my state as the intro language. Even MIT, the source of SICP/Scheme, is using Python for its intro language. It's only much later are you exposed to other languages (at my school, Java, ML and Prolog are explicitly covered).

Maybe I should state. Most schools that USE SICP/Scheme use it as introductory language. Most don't however. MIT has only recently moved to python. That introduction course used to be Scheme based which converted to python. I believe they have a optional scheme course now.

ML was taught at my school for first-years, but they changed it to Java while I was there, much to some professors' (rightful IMO) consternation.