Interesting: he doesn't identify the biggest problem with offering Software Engineering as a separate major. I have my suspicions as to why. Here's the big pr

Interesting: he doesn't identify the biggest problem with offering Software Engineering as a separate major. I have my suspicions as to why. Here's the big problem. Incoming students usually pick majors as freshmen or sophomores. These students do not understand the difference between software engineering and computer science: they naturally assume that by signing up for a software engineering major they'd be preparing themselves for the exciting world of coding. After all that's what you're doing, right? Electrical engineering students learn to build actual circuits. Why shouldn't software engineering students learn to build actual programs? Totally reasonable. Much of this problem is due to software engineering's misappropriation of the term "software engineering": but to students that term is largely synonymous with "software development" (and students aren't alone -- this is a common association in the industry as well). Unless software engineering faculty do a better job of explaining the difference, this will continue to be a major bugaboo. The problem is that it's not in the interest of software engineering faculty to make this distinction to students, because to nearly all students, building a computer game is much cooler than defining its UML layout on paper. Departmental budgets are driven by butts in seats... why make it clear that a student who wants to code that he's in the wrong major because of an unfortunate terminological distinction coined in the late 1960s?