I don't think Northeastern is worried about attracting applicants, they were the 8th most applied-to school in the US last year, with nearly 100K applicants. And CS is one of their most popular programs.

I think the more likely cause is pressure from their co-op program's partner employers to make the intro curriculum more 'practical' (i.e. outsourcing training from the employer to school). It's beneficial in the short-term but IMO a loss in the long-term, Northeastern is a university not a bootcamp.

My biggest worry is that maybe the co-op program for CS became a "low interest rate" phenomenon over the years from ~2009-2020 and now they don't want to take gambles on students that likely need to grow into the role. It's not enough, and they treat it like a regular internship program.

This exists already at Northeastern. They have a data science major and minor with a much more 'practical' intro sequence that teaches in Python. I actually TA'd for it, and many of the students were business or life sciences majors going for a data science minor. It even came with a 1-credit practicum geared towards specific domains, which students could choose from.

I live in California and I recently read an article from the perspective of Berkeley's CS department explaining why they don't take transfer credits from high schoolers who took AP CS or AP Stats -- they're just not "real" Computer Science, but rather applied programming.

Even when I was an undergrad (1995-1999) and a grad student (2008-2011) everyone knew that CS was a research science [that happened to turn out people who lucratively employable skills], and not a software engineering program, which existed separately at both schools.

That uses to be called CIS. When I was at Harvard they still took the algorithms class. Yeah, it was the ezmode version, but it still covered stuff like how to build a hash table and a trie.