People want the easy money that a programming job represents and resent anything that gets in the way of getting it.

Nothing I've done on the job involves deep computer science. There are people who need to know that stuff, but they are specialists. Building CRUD servers or web frontends uses very little of what I studied in college, beyond basic understanding of data structures and algorithmic complexity.

I'm glad I learned CS, and wish I had learned more of it, but it should not be a requirement for getting a code-monkey job.

On the other hand, calculus prerequisites are a filter that filters out anyone who might be inclined to say "math is hard" and give up, which might correlate with people who say "computers are hard" and give up. Or in other words, it's easier to say "Prerequisite: Calculus 2" than it is to say "Prerequisite: be sufficiently determined to complete something many people find hard and give up on, or be one of the people who found it easy to begin with". And lo and behold, rather than getting people taking an advanced CS class and giving up, you instead get people not taking the class in the first place because they don't meet the prerequisites, which makes numbers look a lot better.

This is not the best solution for the problem. It's the solution most CS programs take, though.

(Necessary disclaimer because internet discourse: this is a comment on CS education in general, not a comment on Lambda School in any aspect.)

I think the issue is that many programs expect students to understand 'the basics' of calculus as an academic mathematician understands them, which I would consider to be more suitable as an upper level elective for a CS program.

A fun exercise would be to have graduating CS students take the same calculus exams that were required for admission to the program. I would expect that 10% would score much higher and the other 90% would score much lower.