I have a computer engineering degree. They taught us everything from small circuits (simple resistors, capacitors, etc) to using little chips (IC's), then programming at the processor level, and up to modern programming languages. It was really interesting and gave me a full understanding of how a whole computer is put together!
Right now I'm a developer using C# and a little Java (for Android). I learned C++ first in High School, then Java in College, and then Python/HTML/Javascript/C# in the workplace. My favorite has to be C# though. I can't stand working with Eclipse for Java (could just be the android part that is annoying) and Visual Studio for C# just has me spoiled. The c# language is much cleaner and easier to read than c++ is in my opinion.
To anybody looking at this thread thinking about learning a language to get into the profession, I would go with Java or C#.