My professor is currently promoting excel spreadsheets with add-ons as a front end for business intelligence.

Hmmm it depends what they do. There is a lot of demand for excel. Is he selling them?

In my opinion, taking a course on higher education levels about CS are not really good to become a really good programmer. They'll work to get general basics for programming right an for learning more theoretical things. Problem is that they all use old technologies and methods, which just don't really fit in anymore, unless you'll be working at a huge corporation that is still running on legacy code or the likes.

The degree you'll get from it might be worth it though, as it'll really boost your CV.