I have seen this recommendation about Python. I told my daughter that I wanted her to learn it this summer (she doesn’t have any programming background). I just downloaded it myself and am learning it so that I can help her through.
As far as the professors not teaching programming, I can remember being a freshman in college (UTA) and having a terrible Fortran professor. Luckily, I had a great Pascal teacher in high school and Fortran was very similar. I can remember being in the computer lab and having classmates beg me to help them, though.
As an actuary, I can tell you that the future in almost all STEM fields is going to rely on predictive modeling and AI. The quicker the kids learn how to program, the better it will be for them in the long run.
And I will add that even though these kids are growing up around technology that most of us couldn’t even imagine when we were growing up, I worry that it prevents many of them from digging into how the programs actually work. They don’t have to build a program to do x because there is already an app that does it for them. The best engineers are the ones who are going to be able how to build a program for x… because x hasn’t been invented yet.