Don't market interactivity and serve up rote

Students who come to your school are interested in taking courses about making and learning about games.  Parents - having seen their kids devote thousands of hours in this form of entertainment hope to be able to turn this passion and enthusiasm into a career.  

If your curriculum doesn't have them analyzing, critiquing, writing about and making their first game until the second year, you have  failed.  

Taking last decade's programming or film course, and pasting a 'NEW! Now With Interactive Entertainment' label on it isn't the way to make game developers that we will want to hire in the industry.   Graduates with a single small project and one team project in their resume just get passed over.

The best candidates have had maximum exposure to creating games of all kinds - not just one genre, not just one platform, not just one style.   As many genres, audiences, and styles as you can give them access to.  

 Games are a new and independent medium.  Game engineering isn't  'just like any other programming but with graphics' or 'just like film but with interactivity'.   You have a limited amount of direct contact in the program - where possible course work should be game oriented and relevant to their games career.

Curriculum Ideas:
Focus on speed of iteration, in a design program this is rapid prototyping tools, modding existing games, web/flash and other interpreted platforms.

An Engineering approach might be games in different genres with one missing piece - A 2D RTS game that is missing pathfinding or AI,  a shooter that is missing aiming code, a social game that is missing networking.  (UNTESTED: I just came up with this today, and it would certainly be a lot of work to get set up but I would try to structure a game engineering program this way - building templates with missing pieces.)

Some of the best schools are really starting to get this right!  If I had to pick a primary indicator of success of a game design program it is the number of completed games or the shortest time between idea and execution that the program allows at any given point.