I earned a Computer Science degree in the early 80's. Back then it was less about programming and more about the theory of computability, languages, operating systems, compilers, and hardware. Even the nascent relational theory, networking, and AI was taught to seniors.

While programming was a required part of it, the goal was to train those that would design new OSs, languages and database systems. There was a lot going on back then in these areas- but now fewer people work on the lower level systems and there is more demand for mere programmers, and less need for understanding of the underlying systems.

That said - if you want to distinguish yourself, you need to know what is going on in the layers below your code - and that's where the real computer science is happening.