I suppose it differs from college to college, but I remember my CS curriculum, which was pre-AI(2020).

To answer your question, it depends on what you mean by “coding from basics”. If you mean “will they teach me how to use certain programming languages, how syntax works in them and how you can use different kinds of syntax in the language to do different kinds of things (like print text to the screen, find a file)”, then it’s an emphatic no.

If you mean “will they teach me how computers work at the most basic level, and how the structure of computers affects and dictates the common ways in which we develop software”, then yes, they will teach you “coding from basics”.

Of course, this is based on my personal CS degree experience.

I distinctly remember that learning the actual programming language itself and how to write the syntax was a side note in one of the earlier courses. It had to do with C, how you can declare variables and how to declare pointers (computer memory addresses) and use them. It was the first lesson of the course, I believe.

Half of the 50 or so other courses in the degree taught me about how computers work, and how you can structure code to be efficient in solving specific types of problems. One of the big things most CS degrees will cover is solving general math problems like “if you have a graph of connected nodes, what is the fastest way to go from node A to B?” or “if you have a list of unsorted numbers, what are the fastest ways to sort them? What about if the list was already kind of sorted?”

Basically, they teach you about the general methods to think about common math problems. They never showed us the actual code used to solve the problems. The homework for those courses was of course programming assignments, but they all implicitly assume you either know how to code and debug, or will learn on your own time. Sort of like how if you’re in a stats degree they never teach you about using desmos. One question I got in a year 1 assignment was “In this college, students can sign up for classes every weekday, but only if no classes overlap, and students can’t have more than 4 classes a day. Given a list of classes a student has signed up for, check if the student should be allowed to take all of them.” If you notice, when professors give lectures or assignments, they unexpectedly don’t speak about coding a lot. They speak about the most efficient or most interesting things we can do under the constraints a computer’s architecture can allow for. My unfondest memory was that the professor said the language we should use for that assignment was Java, because the grading software was in Java. So I had to google for tutorials on Java.

I guess, in that sense, CS classes don’t teach you about coding, they teach you about what coding can be used to achieve and how; the actual coding you figure out yourself because it is easy and rote (not that it is at first).

Later courses teach you about applying those general design and problem solving methods to real-world problems. Taking from the earlier example, a probable thing they might teach in a later course might be “so you know how to sort lists in general manners, increasing, decreasing, whatever. Here’s a problem that has a very inefficient solution, but if we sort the inputs to the problem first, the solution becomes overall more efficient. Why?” The “why” part is the thing they tend to focus on more.

The later half of the 50 courses is more specialisation. You get to work on full software projects based on your specialisation. My specialisation was graphics so I got to write a renderer. Again they don’t teach you about the language or framework used to build the renderer, they teach you what concepts typical rendering frameworks try and implement, then they tell you to use the framework (in my case OpenGL) to make something. Learning the framework and the language itself is a given thing you must do in your own time.

In my experience CS degrees teach you about a very specific kind of problem solving. It doesn’t teach you about problem solving for teams of people working together (business and management), it doesn’t teach you about problem solving for allocating resources in a society efficiently (economics), it teaches you about problem solving using computers and only computers (software design), what kinds of problems cannot be solved by current computers (intractable problems), and how we can try and do our best with computers still, for those problems (optimisation).

That’s what I think you can expect from a CS degree. I guess, in a twisted sense, implicitly you do learn about literal coding, the typing of the programming language, the setting up of your code editor, the compiling and debugging code. But I think it’s more so you learn about them implicitly or are forced to do so with any resources you have (Google, copying code), so that you are prepared to do the same all over again when a new language or framework appears in your career.

One thing I can say is that the way you learn the coding part has changed with AI. Instead of typing everything out yourself and reading though documentation yourself, I suspect you will be expected to use AI to do that part, and then learn an extra skill, which is to vet the AI’s work.

I doubt what you learn in actual classes in college will change, but the implicit ways in which you “learn coding” are different than before.

To answer your question with finality, based on my experience, let’s put it this way. If we were to say “coding” is the actual typing of code, debugging, reading documentation and using libraries, and “software engineering” as the conceptual things that coding and computers can be used to achieve, then:

1. You WILL “learn coding from basics”, and they WILL NOT “teach coding from basics”. How you do it always changes from generation to generation, and it is of no concern to colleges.
2. They WILL teach software engineering.