\textbf{Background and Context.} Instruction in most introductory computing courses is typically focused on how to program. However, it has become clear that non-majors who take computing courses have a diverse set of desired endpoints. One group of non-majors are the conversational programmers, who do not want to program in their career but enroll in computing courses to improve their ability to communicate about technical topics and their competitiveness in the job market. Research suggests that these learners need an alternate instructional approach, but so far, conversational programmers in higher educational contexts have only been studied in a limited number of small-scale studies in single majors. \textbf{Objectives.} To inform curriculum design for conversational programmers at the university level, we (a) examine the prevalence of conversational programmers among non-major computing students overall and within various demographics and majors, (b) investigate factors associated with these learners’ motivation to learn computing, and (c) understand conversational programmers’ desired learning goals and classroom activities. \textbf{Methods.} We designed a survey based on Expectancy-Value Theory and prior work about the learning goals of conversational programmers. We collected responses from randomly sampled non-major students at a large public university who had taken at least one computer science course. We analyzed the survey data with descriptive and inferential statistics. \textbf{Findings.} We found that conversational programmers are the largest proportion of non-major students in our sample, both overall and across historically underrepresented groups in CS. We replicated prior findings that conversational programmers have low self-efficacy for programming. We found that conversational programmers’ motivation for learning computing is paradoxically driven more by interest in the topic than by its utility, despite their general lack of enjoyment in computing. We validate a previously proposed set of conversational programmer learning goals and show that conversational programmers value employment-oriented learning goals over those focused on conversation. \textbf{Implications.} Our results indicate that addressing the needs of conversational programmers can contribute to broadening participation in computing. Our findings suggest future directions for learner-centered curriculum design that can address the learning needs of conversational programmers by enhancing their self-efficacy prior to focusing on conversational goals.