I wasn't trying to imply they are dim, I'm sure at Stanford they're brighter than the average students. My comment was more about CS degrees in general. I have talked to quite a few CS grads that were expecting more of a software engineering degree and were disappointed with what they thought was too much useless theory. I probably could have picked better examples to make my point.
Ah, thanks for clarifying. I've heard and read similar complaints, though they usually take the form that the CS programs just do a bad job with both the theory and the applications. I've read some and asked some to break down "a bad job" in theory, it leads to complaints like "outdated", "seems useless", "is useless", "needlessly complicated when we have X", "bad teacher", "presented slowly", "nothing bleeding-edge/it's all from the 60s", and so on. Breaking down a bad job in applications is mostly "didn't teach me X."
