"I went to a big state school in the 90s. The first two years were a hazing, with a brutal curve designed to drop class size from 1000+ (CSI 200) to about 80 graduates."
Is your "CSI 200" a general-interest course? I went to a fairly large university's computer science program, but even the intro course for the majors was probably only about 200 people/semester, which at this particular institution, meant taking the "200" level courses as a freshman. The 100-level courses were the courses the department taught to the rest of university for general requirements of other degrees. Those were easily in the thousands, but they were not majoring in CS. The gulf between a 100 and 200 course was still fairly large, but it wasn't a "hazing", it was similar to the difference you'd see in any department offering general courses and specialist courses like biology or physics.
I don't we particularly had "hazing", but just like any other major, it isn't for everyone, and there is a certainly baseline you're going to need to be able to succeed. This is not unique to computer science, or even engineering. If your school had a music program, did you ever ask them what they were expected to do? I minored in music and I was grateful for how much free time I had relative to the ones majoring in it.... and CS was no slouch with the homework, obviously.
In my school, CSI 2xx was the entry point for majors. There were two courses (Intro and a logic class) with just under 1000 enrolled.
The 3xx entry point class was 400 people, the next 3xx mandatory class was 250 and the 400s were typically 20-50 students.
I think one issue was they didn’t gate by GPA or other metrics. So you had many students who just couldn’t hack the math or didn’t have the drive early in the cycle. That decision tainted the professors... you were an idiot until proven otherwise.
I dual majored in history and it was night and day. Similar workload, but a totally different outlook. I still exchange Christmas cards with a couple of my history professors.
Is your "CSI 200" a general-interest course? I went to a fairly large university's computer science program, but even the intro course for the majors was probably only about 200 people/semester, which at this particular institution, meant taking the "200" level courses as a freshman. The 100-level courses were the courses the department taught to the rest of university for general requirements of other degrees. Those were easily in the thousands, but they were not majoring in CS. The gulf between a 100 and 200 course was still fairly large, but it wasn't a "hazing", it was similar to the difference you'd see in any department offering general courses and specialist courses like biology or physics.
I don't we particularly had "hazing", but just like any other major, it isn't for everyone, and there is a certainly baseline you're going to need to be able to succeed. This is not unique to computer science, or even engineering. If your school had a music program, did you ever ask them what they were expected to do? I minored in music and I was grateful for how much free time I had relative to the ones majoring in it.... and CS was no slouch with the homework, obviously.