I wonder if one of the obstacles is the time and expertise required of teachers to develop course materials that are ecology focussed? If so, I think it is worth noting that the Data Carpentry community has freely available ecology focussed teaching materials to support teaching computer programming to ecologists. Perhaps similar communit...

I agree that having classes "taught by quantitative ecologists so that the curriculum is applied and relevant" is important in motivating the quantitative nature of the field. However, I also worry how many departments or universities actually have professors that are comfortable enough themselves to teach ecology courses that use mathematics, statistics, or programming.