Every programmer in this earth is self taught
The job of any university is to aid you in your intellectual development.
It is not to prepare you for industry. That’s the job of vocational schools (trade schools) and bootcamps.
It is not to make sure you have an easy time. In fact, if you find it easy, you’re probably just wasting your time (and money, if it’s a paid university).
Additionally, the job of a computer science curriculum is not to teach you to program – it’s to teach you, surprise, surprise, computer science.
You’re supposed to learn programming and programming languages on your own; the languages that are in the course are just examples (note those are not only C and C++; in most courses you should encounter at least 5–6 languages).
Also, I don’t think C and C++ have alternatives, much less better alternatives. When you need them, they’re generally non-negotiable (think interfacing with most of the popular operating systems, interfacing with hardware, writing programs that need to be fast, etc.).
Besides, C is a very educational language, in that it teaches you to think like a computer*. And about the difficulty, C++ can indeed be considered a bit difficult, but there’s nothing difficult about C (however, there is “lots of difficult” about computers – which is sometimes mistaken for C itself being difficult).
* – Just don’t forget to re-learn to think like a human afterwards – computers are exceptionally dumb beasts, you don’t want to spend your life thinking like one 🙂
