My degree required a class like this. It was the most useless class I took.

The theory heavy classes (automata, algorithms etc...) covered material that changes very slowly.

But, as a previous poster said "we don't yet understand software engineering." Because of this software engineering best practices change with the wind. As a result, the software engineering class was a hopelessly outdated survey of how software was built in the early 90s when our professor last worked in industry.