Absolutely this. I'm a second-year in Computer Engineering in college, and I quickly noticed that the average student here doesn't actually like programming at all.

I mean, none of these people actually have much of any personal projects, and the few that do mostly got the ideas out of a list of "great beginner projects to make your CV look good"... Not out of curiosity, passion or fun. Nobody tinkers, hacks, explores...

Of course that's an over generalization, there's still a few young hackers here and there, but we're a very small minority.

It's sad to see, I always thought that college would be the place where I would finally find passionate people who could talk about computer science for hours and hours, but so far I haven't even met one.