I know that some of my friends from college went and did a 1-year CS masters program after their science degree. The curriculum was programming and basic CS fun

I know that some of my friends from college went and did a 1-year CS masters program after their science degree. The curriculum was programming and basic CS fundamentals. I think this is pretty close to "going to university to learn programming languages" so I do think it still happens today. That said, I think the way of proving competency would still fall to projects because there are so many ways to take classes on programming these days that simply doing it doesn't mean you've learned anything.