I studied physics, not CS, so I can't really speak to the CS curriculum part. But I am someone who has written rust professionally for a few years so I'll describe how I got there. I think the most experience I've ever had with C was writing a fourth order Runge-Kutta routine and calling it from python for a college project. Maybe 20 lines of C? In industry for the first 5yr I wrote lots of python and java code for web APIs and "big data" systems. Simultaneously around 2015 I started getting interested in rust because it seemed interesting, and like it would probably play a big role in the next 20yr--memory safety without a garbage collector is inherently compelling if you've spent time trying to make java GC act right. Eventually I got a job which was a full time rust gig. After about 3 years of that I ended up in a golang shop. So I've written some tens of thousands of lines of rust and only a few lines of C. I read C, but it would take a while for me to get comfortable writing it. But I wouldn't, probably, because I can use rust instead.