I never bothered to go to college although I obtained my advanced education in the Computer Science field from the U.S. Army and then from On the Job Training once I left the military.
I've had to work with college graduates who supposedly learned much more than I ever did with their degree, and not one of them has been useful until I taught them what they really needed to know to excel in this field.
Those who went to a technical school were much more useful from the start, but even they needed guidance to become useful.
“Those who went to a technical school were much more useful from the start, but even they needed guidance to become useful.”
Everybody needs real world experience to become useful. Nothing worse than engineers right out of college (and yes I once was one). University is great to learn theory, but it takes experience to learn the difference between theory and reality. Trade schools do not have as much problem with this because their education is based more in practical applications, so their graduates at least have a greater sense of the difference between theory and reality. You want to see the worst of this, give old scientists who have worked in research their entire lives authority over the construction of a manufacturing facility based on one of their pet projects. They cannot comprehend the fact that large scale manufacturing facilities, no matter how awesome, and clever, the automation, cannot reproduce lab conditions to 5 orders of precision like they can in controlled lab conditions, and the equipment purchased to measure such things, cannot give 5 decimal places of precision either. Lot’s of amusing arm flailing...but what always happens once the plant gets running, is the operators, and the foremen (the uneducated), eventually figure out how to massage the large systems to run, and coerce the big machines to produce the good quality product.