The questions that are proposed as the basis for academy panel sessions are important ones to ask. In the aggregate, they cover an enormous expanse of the software engineering landscape. The reality of undergraduate computing education is that the vast majority of students do not go through software engineering curricula where there is time to address the academy questions in some depth. Instead, they are in computer science or computer engineering programs, and receive their software engineering education in a single course. What students should really learn in this first, and often only, software engineering course is important because the majority of computing students will not see any other software engineering. The course designer will need to make judicious choices in selecting the material for this course because all of software engineering will not fit in just one course even if you try by using one of the classic software engineering tomes as the textbook. I do not know the right answer to the question I pose in the title of this position paper. I suspect that there is no one set of software engineering topics that should be included, but rather a range of topics to select from based on the purpose and perspective of the course. The answer to this question is important to everyone who has responsibility for providing the software engineering education for the next generation of computing students.
