Depends on the country, and furthermore where I’ve seen them included they’re isolated either to a specialized track or to the last months of school, which stil

Depends on the country, and furthermore where I’ve seen them included they’re isolated either to a specialized track or to the last months of school, which still counts as “advanced” as far as I’m concerned and, I expect, as far as the students think about it. (I also think learning linear algebra from the matrices side rather than from the linear transformations side, as was indeed common for mathematicians in the 19th century and for physicists and engineers well into the 20th, is both unnecessarily painful and almost impossible to pull off well. So if a syllabus lists its basics-of-linear-algebra part as “matrices” it’s probably missing the point. Knowing that you do rows times columns is of very little value, the part that makes it worth it is the why.)