While I do tend to agree with you and I'm a firm believer in "learning by doing", which I can especially see in my (young) kids but I never got the "learned more in 4 months working than 4 years of school" premise/idea.

Sorry in advance of this a tangent and maybe I'm just lucky that I'm the product of a good education or perhaps I have always had the wrong jobs, but while I of course learned tons by working I have never been able to compare what I learned at university and on the job, not because they are fundamentally different, just different.

I never learned or more importantly had time to deep dive into an issue for months of time on the job compared to university. Things have to be solved fast, go go style a client is waiting. Perhaps this is a product of the jobs I have had, don’t have enough data to say otherwise.

But I have never at university learned how to for instance lead a team or communicate effectively to non-academics. This is not something I expected of my university of course as these are very different skills.

But what I did learn was to understand the computer at a deeper level, which helps me every day and I find to be crucial to my day job.

I value my university degree/time dearly, but it is of course not the real world and of course not everything is applicable, but you never really know what is before you need it I guess.

By this not saying that teaching shouldn’t evolve, innovate and/or change for the better, I think I’m just saying it is doing some stuff right, and I believe (no data backing here) that our industry wouldn’t get or continue to get the innovations we have achieved without at least some university foundations sprinkled in there :)

What would you change? :)

I can back up your experience. My university studies were focused on maths and theoretical computer science, and I've learned a lot of things there that are unlikely to be learned on a regular job. That said, at least my PhD did feel a bit like an apprenticeship in how it was structured. It was an apprenticeship for becoming an academic - and while I don't work in academia anymore, that has given me some useful skills that most of my peers don't have. (Of course, there are also skills that I don't have but some of my peers do. In many teams it's useful to have a mix of academically and not academically inclined folks, and the ideal mixture obviously depends on the kind of work the team does.)

I’ve always worked in very technical fields so I feel that my university education was always essential to my ability to do the job.

Engineers, computer scientists, and mathematicians are usually expected to know more than what 4 months of experience on the job would provide.

I can relate and agree with this sentiment.

Sure, not everything is applicable but the solid foundation goes a very long way.

I also see others fail at some tasks because they are not able to understand the foundations. Not saying it would be solved by going to university, but it might have helped to study it without tight deadlines and in a world where nobody has time to wait

I’ve been working in a technical field for 20 years without a degree. In my professional experience, every new college graduate that I onboard ends up needing many months of “do-with” time before they — and their fresh updated knowledge — are useful to the organization.

Why do you think apprenticeship doesn't give profound education? The idea of apprenticeship is that you are learning directly from the master, who defines the curriculum. It starts with the theory which the field requires, you just do real work instead of artificial test cases to foster the knowledge.

I think that apprenticeship was always better than the classrooms, but we were forced into the classrooms by the circumstances of the modernity: massive population growth and urbanization. In the 19-20th centuries we simply couldn't afford to have master-apprentice relationships when masters were few and pupils were many. Also quantity was preferred over quality.

Nowadays apprenticeship is seeming more feasible, with current demographics and preference for quality labor.