What program was this? It sounds much closer to what I wish my CS degree had been. In my CS program, the courses I actually enjoyed were the math-heavy, but always optional, like computability/decidability/complexity, cryptography, etc.

The mandatory "practical" courses were often much worse. For example, I studied relational algebra on my own, plus a few chapters from Kleppmann's Data-Intensive Applications book, and it was painful to realise how shallow it made the mandatory database course look.

I agree that CS should not be mere job training. I think many CS programs are neither rigorous enough to feel like math/science and prepare you for proper academic work, nor practical enough to be good vocational training. They sit in a bad middle ground, where academics teach industry-lite.

Industry-lite is a good way to describe it. I remember having a 300 level class which was supposed to be about real world application architecture but it was essentially just about making UML diagrams (because the professor happened to be on the board of whoever was in charge of UML.) Nobody serious (even at the time!) uses UML.