Can your friends tell the difference between a NFA and a DFA, NP-Hard and NP-Complete, or a monad and an applicative functor? If I go in for a computer science degree, I damn well don't want to be taught something I could get from Sams Teach Yourself Java In 24 Minutes.
Sproingie is spot on. A Computer Science degree is not the same curriculum as going to a trade school to get a .NET certification and learn to create CRUD applications. Sans single-credit electives, you're only really taught programming languages as tools to learn the math and theory. Students are pretty much expected to be self-motivated to learn languages. And as an armchair academic, I like it that way.

This is somewhat of an educated (?) guess on my part, but that may be why a masters in CS doesn't seem to help as much in private industry as it does for other fields. Getting an MS
does not mean you're going to be a better programmer than the next guy who only got his bachelor's. You didn't learn Java more in-depth than him, nor did you learn how to write iPhone apps better than he did. You learned about automata theory, AI, compiler design, security, etc. You have a broader knowledge of computer science though.
Whether or not you're a better programmer really boils down to how your work experience compares to his.