I'm in grad school at a university that was one of the first to have a software engineering accredited program. My undergrad is in CS. An employer recently recruited at our university and hired 5 SE majors. None of them were CS. Do employers prefer software engineering majors?The reason I ask is because I can focus on many different areas during my graduate studies and really want to take the classes that will help me land a great job. Right now I'm either going to use CUDA and parallelize an advanced ray-tracer for a graduate project or do research on non-photo-realistic rendering in augmented reality. Pursuing these would leave very little SE classes in my schedule.If I went the software engineering route, I would probably either do research into data-oriented programming or software design complexity. Sometimes I think when I'm 40 and look back will it matter at all? For some reason I'm thinking not.
Do employers prefer software engineering over CS majors?
career development
I do a lot of developer interviews for my organization.  I care very little about the particular degree a person has or the particular university it is from.  The fact that they have a degree means a little bit, but still doesn't tell me much.  It only tells me that they are focused enough to work toward a long-term goal.What really matters to me is the person's technical knowledge, attitude, personality, drive, etc.So to answer the question directly, I would have no preference either way between CS or SE degrees.  And this is for jobs working on standard line-of-business applications.