It was a not-quite joke because it was true. Art schools were much better at producing creative musicians than the music colleges, because they taught creativity and experimentation, not just mechanical technique.

>a student gains a certain expertise and rigor in an academic environment needed before she can create her works of art.

It's more usual for students to learn a stock set of academic techniques and philosophies, which are really just there as a form of social signalling that qualifies them for tenure or adjunct track professorships making academic art.

Unfortunately academic art values theory, technique, and philosophy over direct expression, so it's rare for academic art to have much of an audience outside academia.

CS has a similar problem. I think it would be incredibly valuable for everyone doing a CS degree to combine with it a non-technical creative minor, preferably working on a collaborative project with someone with an arts background. It would highlight how brittle code is, and how attempting to model an open problem domain with relatively trivial code constructs can miss a lot of important detail and subtlety.

A friend of mine works in non-tech recruiting. Just about every job they post requires a degree. Their understanding of the world now leans towards the idea that getting a degree is more important than life itself.

It's pretty bad when your HR person, a recent psych grad, doesn't know what bipolar is. My friend tells me tons of stories like this all the time..