That's not so clear. Other theories I've heard include "college is a good proxy for being reasonably intelligent and able to complete a difficult task" (mostly from employers themselves) and the more cynical "college education is a class signifier." I personally would say that college is worthwhile, from a purely work perspective, because it provides the student with the tools to encounter a new problem or concept, learn about it, and teach himself how to solve it, but that there's something to the other two explanations I mentioned too. My Japanese degree taught me nothing about programming, but the experience of learning Japanese in a university was useful when I decided I wanted to learn how to program.

Of course there are exceptions (if you're a doctor your higher education materials were obviously directly relevant), but to me this helps explain why so many employers care about a college degree, and not necessarily a degree in a particular subject.

> Not because you're so much better off because you had a class on .Net and Network fundamentals.

A computer science program that has courses devoted to stuff like .NET frankly doesn't sound like a very good one, since the idea of learning comp-sci is to understand underlying principles rather than memorizing how to use a particular tool.