Do you want breadth, or depth? Experience is good for depth of technical skills and office collaboration skills. Education provides introduction and breadth o

Do you want breadth, or depth? Experience is good for depth of technical skills and office collaboration skills. Education provides introduction and breadth of topics. Employers generally want to minimize the amount of on the job learning a new hire has to do. That means depth in the skill sets they want. And that doesn't even include employers who run an website/app assembly line and don't want to hire cogs, not engineers. ---- Allow me to make the case for breadth, because your personal goals should be broader than focusing on what employers want and being a really really really good fit for small percentage of jobs. Sacrificing your education to "focus on gaining experience" is a con. You want to be hire-able long term. To the extent that experience proves you can build something, have a project to show for yourself. Not a senior project, something you care about, with utility to yourself, something that by the time you get to an undergrad project, you just want to work on your thing for credit. I can't even count the number of times I've benefited professionally from a few kernels of knowledge something outside my main work focus but knew because of a "topics" course I once took. Having an idea what already exists out there in the world, even if the skills aren't strong is a huge boon to solving problems as the come up, or approaching a new design. Otherwise you're often re-inventing the wheel, or feeling around in the dark until you stumble upon a professional domain you didn't know existed and can start reading their literature. The upsides of depth are just much more visible than the downsides of lacking breadth.