I think this actually varies from school to school. My undergraduate university, where the CS program was part of the engineering school, focused on software en

I think this actually varies from school to school. My undergraduate university, where the CS program was part of the engineering school, focused on software engineering. My graduate university where the CS program was a part of the college of arts and sciences focused a lot more on theory. But my view here may be skewed, because I only remember one professor who taught most of our theory courses -- I took most of his classes. From roughly the same number of years in university, (8ish) I can say there were some clear professional benefits from me having done a masters' program. From my advanced software engineering course I was able to talk to my teammates about Gang of Four and better ways go about problems than if-else loops. From my theory courses I was able to identify problems they were seeing, tell them which algorithms would probably be worth looking into etc... That is all stuff one can learn outside of university, but I learned it while I was there. I get giddy whenever I can try something new and all the writing I did (I wrote a few academic papers) made me really comfortable with writing technical design specs and documentation. When I was in academia I had to document everything anyways so its become second nature to me. I think 2-3 more years of working would have certainly looked better on a resume, but I think my skill set has added to my team as a whole and I'm glad I did it.