I don't think you're wrong about how people perceive this. But, it's funny because at my "top-ranked" CS college you could absolutely graduate having coded the exact same guided CS projects as everyone else (about 2 years worth of classes, which, granted, is more time than most coding schools).

You _could_ take electives with complicated freeform projects, or that mimicked actual software engineering, or that focused on the state of the art in various CS specializations, but you didn't need to.