A local college is teaching C++ to first year college students (16 years old) with no prior programming experience.

As first programming language, is C++ suitable?

Emphatically No.

For any goal you have in mind for students, another language or sequence of languages would be faster and better. Examples.

"Students need to understand low-level concepts."

"Low-level" coding does not consist of getting objects from new, feeding them back to delete, and occasionally having a pointer pointing somewhere it shouldn't. Functions, classes, and templates are not low-level. RAII, 12 ways to use const, std::ostream::operator<<, protected and  new are not low-level concepts. Those things have low-level implications and you're skipping those for months or until a future class and teaching mountains of C++ semantics instead.

I suggest assembler with a good environment and teaching material like MIPS or MMIX. If you're in a hurry, teach C with detours to at least look at the assembler output. This will give you all the low-level understanding C++ does, and then some, faster.

"Students need to understand object-orientation."

The object-orientation built into C++ is way overcomplicated for teaching OO concepts, or almost any other high-level concept. See The C++ FAQ for a nice, long list of potential reasons why. You either have to hit all of that stuff, which will take a very, very long time with new programmers; or else you have to skip lots of it, leaving the new programmers in the dark--effectively, not really knowing C++! 

I suggest learning a simpler, high-level language with objects first (Python, Ruby, Squeak, Common Lisp, Racket), if you must teach C++ at all. Beyond that, learn polymorphism as a concept that is separate from OO by visiting a functional language.

"Students need to understand templates and template metaprogramming."

No one really asks this, but I wish they would. C++ has nice templates and STL is cool, but they just shouldn't be a high enough priority to teach C++ first. Teaching the OCaml or Haskell type system and then retrofitting those concepts might be faster anyway.

"Students need to learn problem solving."

Yeah, you get this in any language, and you get more if it in almost any language other than C++ because there's way less baggage. Again, see The C++ FAQ for a list of all the things students will be learning instead of problem-solving skills.

"All of the above, and we need to use only one language." or "Employers want it." or "We need a C-style language." or...

Teach more than one language.

The idea that you save time or energy by teaching or learning just one language is flatly ridiculous. It's based on the idea that learning any given language takes exactly X man months (HINT! HINT!) where X is a single number or one number per language. This is nearly identical to the idea that you can save time and money by skipping all that 'requirements' and 'testing' garbage.

As for multiple syntaxes, you dangerously cripple students if you teach them to expect the C syntax in every language by making them wildly biased against other languages.

Almost any path is faster and better than starting with C++. Learning a simple high-level language and then C++ would be faster. Learning assembler and then C++ would be faster. Anything other than C++ will get students there faster and they will know way more to boot. Just don't teach C++ first.
