I dunno, the news of exorbitant salaries of SV programmers slowly make it into the mainstream media and those jobs are sometimes mentioned next to other traditionally highly desirable career choices, such as a doctor or a lawyer. Given how much America equates human worth with money, it should translate into increase in social status.

Another take: CS is in no small part just an obscure field of mathematics with only tangential contact with the real world. No wonder people don't care about it. Software engineering, on the other hand, should have higher social status.