I have to say that Java is the absolute worst language for pedagogy. Before people can write "Hello world", they're told they have to write "public static void main(String[] args)", which are presented as magic incantations, "don't worry about those yet". Thus begins the corporate-style coding culture of bashing stuff without understanding it.
The stated reason for starting in Java is so that students can get coding jobs based on one or two CS classes, but two issues come to mind there. First, I generally wouldn't hire someone (in a technology company) who took one CS class and didn't continue-- but at least if she passed an SICP-style course, I'd know that she learned how to think about computational problems. Second, you don't "know Java" when you come out of school. Java is actually highly complicated (in good ways and bad) and the average college student hasn't been exposed to all the mess of it (and that's probably good, because, while OOP means about 20 different things to different people, business-style OOP is cataclysmic).
The stated reason for starting in Java is so that students can get coding jobs based on one or two CS classes, but two issues come to mind there. First, I generally wouldn't hire someone (in a technology company) who took one CS class and didn't continue-- but at least if she passed an SICP-style course, I'd know that she learned how to think about computational problems. Second, you don't "know Java" when you come out of school. Java is actually highly complicated (in good ways and bad) and the average college student hasn't been exposed to all the mess of it (and that's probably good, because, while OOP means about 20 different things to different people, business-style OOP is cataclysmic).