And UNC is a top tier CS school, not even close to representative of "local branch campus". My undergrad OS course didn't even have us implement malloc or free

And UNC is a top tier CS school, not even close to representative of "local branch campus". My undergrad OS course didn't even have us implement malloc or free... CMU's sophomore systems course is a lot more rigorus, let alone their OS course. And that's in systems courses where the variance is actually a lot smaller than in other subfields. There was simply no course in my undergraduate institutions curriculum where you could learn what a Turing machine or even DFA was! We never saw real asymptotic complexity analysis (our algorithms course spent most of the semester reviewing basic data structures as interview prep). Obviously no AI or ML course. Even where there was coverage the material covered was so different. For example, the PL course was all about using a functional PL and didn't include any of the type theory, logic programming, language implementation work, etc. It was a watered down version of SICP, which is an intro course. If you think the difference in quality between UNC and CMU is large, consider the massive difference between branch campuses and top-ranked public research universities. For all practical purposes, "CS" means something very different at regional branch campuses than at top tier research universities like UNC and CMU.