One part of this doesn't make sense to me. Can only talk about German universities, and I started in 2003, but...

They will start with math you already know, but only in the first semester, so from October until Christmas, from then on everything is mostly new. But... to be eligible to study you kind of have to have had math on that level at school. with no exceptions.

But for anything programming related? In the late 90s/early 00s there was ZERO mandatory programming in school, and if you were really, really lucky if there was any graded course. We had some elective courses but they were not really awesome and only there because one teacher wanted to do them.

So, I'm also against rehashing stuff you should know, but if you can't know it from school, why wouldn't they start at the beginning?