But you could say the same about high school. It doesn’t follow that reading writing and algebra are bad vocational investments, in fact the opposite because they support many possible vocations.
As a CS professor, my goal is to push students to rewire their brains in ways that are better and more effective. It is also for them to gain foundational understanding that will allow them to learn advanced vocational skills. I teach theory so software engineering may be different. But of course I don’t want to teach something that will mainly be useful only for the next 2-3 years of their career, I want to have an impact on the next 20-30.
In the future I'm hoping to run their tests inside Valgrind to check for memory leaks, enable the various sanitizers, etc., and I also need to figure out a way to check for conformance with my code formatting standard, but for right now it gives students perfect knowledge of what their grade will be when they submit.
That said, I spent a lot of time building extracurricular websites in my spare time, which was also a huge leg up in my future career.
It's still not what's most important at uni, imho. You have 5 years at uni, many decades at your job.
I did it mostly because it is easier to get visa
Generally i do not consider higher edu institutions as a place where i can do/learn advanced stuff related to computers
The power of a university education is on several levels. One is the community of peers that you are part of. Second is the ability to learn what you need to and to learn what the limits of your knowledge are. Tech changes quickly and no university syllabus will ever be fully up to date. Besides, that is never their goal. Third is to to provide a safe environment to try and fail. Finally, a university degree is a basic filter. Completing a degree shows an ability to learn new things, be tested and demonstrate a decent understanding. You may fault the methods or the result but the process is effective and no, bootcamps or community work are not a substitute.
A university is not all about research but research is an extremely important skill to have. it manifests in ways that you may not imagine at the time.
What???
It is incredibly stressful environment cuz if you fail then youll have to spend more time (so less vacations), maybe even pay some $$ or at worst have to take course again
There is time to learn that your habits need to be changed in order to be successful in the long-term.
There is more support for investigating things that you think are worth investigating, and there can be positive reinforcement that some people find meaningful (e.g., repsect for presenting at student conferences) instead of "just" a paycheck.
University certainly provides a way to establish your credibility and build a portfolio that can be broader than $dayjob gives you the opportunity to do.
At the university there is very easy access to people with a very broad skill set. No need to beg HR to allow you to hire an ML specialist... just go down the hall and talk to Professor X.
It's not perfect, and not everyone makes as much of it as they could, but there are big plusses to the university system.
In my world there was always lack of time cuz other courses wanted their important^tm projects too, so instead of deep dive into fancy topics that was just pass and move on and learn it yourself
In hs i liked math, in higher edu institution i had no time for it
But ive been working full time almost whole time