I knew guys who only studied databases or only studied HTML+JavaScript+CSS. And we all expected that this level of specialization was common and even desirable! Wow. Looking back now, how silly of us. Where did we get this idea? Certainly not from anyone with significant experience in industry. We had one professor with significant industry experience... from the days of IBM mainframes. She was the head of the department. She ran two classes a year, in "software engineering", basically "technical writing and project management". They were good classes, the most like the "real world" of any of our courses, but only 50% of the students took it and it represented maybe 10% of our studies for those of us who did.
Yes, the CS degree is about preparing students for CS graduate programs. But there was never a suggestion that perhaps the CS degree was not what we needed. Or maybe there was a suggestion, one, from some guy on Teh Intarwebs, against every other person in positions of respect around us. We were consistently told that the CS degree was the path to a software development degree. Yes, internships. They are very important. We don't do enough of them. We certainly need more of an apprenticeship model. I suspect that the development of good programmers would work in a culinary school model more than a research school model.
College graduates are basically the first level of competency worth training to become developers, or at least are supposed to be (let's just stick to ideal situations right now, with no wind resistance and infinite point masses). It's like in the martial arts, we say that black-belt is where the learning begins. Once you reach black-belt/BSCS, you have only acquired the tools that you need to start learning.
Every programmer I've known thought he was a super hacker by the time he got out of college. Me included. I see it in the interviews I conduct, also. There is an air of arrogance. There is a sense of shock and personal assault when pointing out their errors. They haven't yet grocked that the code is not them. They haven't yet learned that the errors are inevitable, that it is only time and experience that teaches us how to avoid them, that programming is about the pursuit of eventual perfection and not the dogmatic defense of yesterday's code.
So one of two things happens. Either the degreed programmer shucks his hubris and finds humility, or he becomes a leech on his coworkers (and my use of the masculine pronoun is no mistake, the female programmers I've known don't have this pathology). Unfortunately, the latter is apparently indistinguishable from the former for most management types. Haha, but digging on the liberal arts majors aside, most people who come out of college with a BS in CS do not want to make programming their wake-to-sleep life. They want it to be their 9-to-5 career, and leeching is the easier route to that.
The kids mean well, I'm sure they are quite intelligent, and they've got heart. But a startup was probably the worst first endeavor for them. I think it's better to go through your male-programmer-humiliation on someone else's dollar. They're basically going into more debt to learn how to be programmers now that they've gotten out of college. They could have been earning a salary to learn how to be programmers.