12 CS courses, offered by the CS dept, and that everyone takes means that either A) your department was internalizing a LOT of service courses; B) left very little room for differentiation within your major; or C) provided very little time for exploration outside of your major.

Either way, that level of straight-jacketing and/or in-sourcing is atypical.

Even at top schools that number is usually below 10. E.g. CMU 6 (well 7, but really 6); Berkeley 4-6; MIT 8; Standford 6.

These are all off the high end of my 4-5 estimate, but only because they ALL in-source a course that at most places would be farmed out the math dept and therefore not counted by my criteria. And MIT also a comm course. Plus, there's the other extreme of places that only require the intro sequence and an algorithms course, leaving all else to the students.

In order to get up to 12 at any of these places you'd need to only offer one course for a lot of the "breadth" requirements, or else in-source the calculus sequence (or similar silly things).

Again, I'm counting courses offered by the CS dept, AND that everyone takes. The minimum viable "common knowledge" we can reliably assume is shared among all CS majors, as offered by the CS dept. IME 4-5 is pretty typical. Maybe 6.

Yes, we also assume some background in other fields of study from CS graduates (some calculus, reading/writing skills, etc.) But those courses are not the ones I was referring to with my 4-5 count. They were also addressed in my original comment.