This is the point where people from my neck of the woods (Ontario, and, frankly, most of Canada) suffer severe cognitive dissonance. We have two very different post-secondary tracks, and around these parts a "college" in colloquial parlance is a diploma-granting institute aimed at providing students with marketable skills (technicians, technologists, accountants, nurses who have no aspirations to teach nursing later). The programs may be two or three years, but they are all identifiable by their practical applicability. (The full designation of such institutions is "Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology".) Quite apart from that, we have the Universities which, apart from a few professional programs (medicine/dentistry, law, etc.), come with no promise of applicability whatever. (And even professional degrees are merely preparation for practical situations that will eventually lead to real certification. A BEng degree doesn't make you an engineer, a PEng certification does, and so on.

The point is that, from my perspective, more people should probably be going to college rather than to University. It's not that we don't need thinkers, but that we need more thinkers that can translate thought into action.

EDIT: closed paren to avoid major bug.