That's true - but if they take a class on networking or operating systems or distributed systems or (insert lots of courses here) they aren't being taught nonse

That's true - but if they take a class on networking or operating systems or distributed systems or (insert lots of courses here) they aren't being taught nonsense that doesn't work... and those disciplines mentioned are used to build the systems that applications run on top of, ie those areas are foundational to the overall system. In finance & economics, all the courses one doesn't need to take isn't material that they can just build on top of because of nice abstractions - they are nonsense that literally isn't used in industry... maybe they are akin to research done in software engineering rather than computer science...