Rust isn't that hard to learn, and many of its user come from managed languages who never dared to learn C, because “it's too hard”.
C looks easy on the surface, but the syntax is pretty dated and full of footguns (yes even just the syntax, not even talking about UBs), and learning the language is a pretty intimidating experience because every time you think you know something, you actually don't and get bitten later.
Rust on the other hand is a good language for CS students: you have a lot of things to assimilate upfront, but when you've reached the level required to fulfill the class, you're actually ready to use it in production, and the resulting code produced by a sophomore will be more stable than C code written by wizards.
I know of two old syntactic footguns (assignment vs equality comparison; precedence of bitwise operators) and a single new one no one cares about (sizeof(int)+1 vs sizeof(int){+1}). The rest of the common bugbears look to be caused solely by bad pedagogy (the declaration syntax is not TYPE NAME; the switch statement is a computed goto not a multiarm conditional; there is no separate struct declaration). What am I missing?
C looks easy on the surface, but the syntax is pretty dated and full of footguns (yes even just the syntax, not even talking about UBs), and learning the language is a pretty intimidating experience because every time you think you know something, you actually don't and get bitten later.
Rust on the other hand is a good language for CS students: you have a lot of things to assimilate upfront, but when you've reached the level required to fulfill the class, you're actually ready to use it in production, and the resulting code produced by a sophomore will be more stable than C code written by wizards.