[RMarcus]

Thanks for the first-hand information! I was also curious about this.

> This is not a course everyone enrolls in.

This is the ticket -- at both the University of Arizona and MIT, I've seen a group of folks graduate with a CS degree after taking OS, compilers, databases, and abstract algebra. Another another group of folks graduated after taking HCI, software engineering, design, and psychology courses. The two groups had some baseline skills (all knew the basic data structures and algorithms), but otherwise appeared quite distinct.

I don't know how to phrase this formally, but I think some statement like the following is true: within-university variance is higher than between-university variance.

(When I was younger, I had strong opinions on which one of these groups were "real" computer scientists. This was a very unfortunate way of thinking that prevented me from talking to folks who I later realized were some of the smartest around. I wish someone had corrected me sooner -- solving a problem with inputs/outputs well-defined enough to apply "rigorous" techniques doesn't make those problems inherently valuable or "harder" than others. God gave all the easy problems to the physicists.)

[pjmlp]

From this side of the atlantic that always seem quite strange to me, the only way to mix so disparate set of skills is to have two degrees, the software engineering degree of the first group + the HCI and psycology stuff in a second degree for social sciences.