That might be your experience, but mine is exactly the opposite. Besides what you've written sounds like trying to self-justify why one didn't get a degree. We

That might be your experience, but mine is exactly the opposite. Besides what you've written sounds like trying to self-justify why one didn't get a degree. We didn't just theorize: my entire advanced C programming class was spent in front of the whiteboard, debugging code; we had to manually depict what the pointers and the memory looked like; the operating systems class required writing a virtual memory manager, and my diploma thesis was building a firewall based on a Sun Enterprise 250, Solaris 7 and CheckPoint Firewall-1. It would be a bit of a stretch to call all of that theoretical, especially since the firewall went into production at the company where I used to work full time while I was studying, also full time. Later on, I debugged and developed for a living and I still do, even though as a technical architect I could comfortably get away with doing nothing but "Powerpoint" and "Excel" all day long. But I don't and the only reason why I don't is because I went to study computer science to program and design computers, not masturbate in the realm of theoretical. None of the CS graduates I ever worked with were pure theorists, we were all driven by applying what we learned in the simplest, most effective way possible. That's what we went to school for, and that's why I can only recommed to everyone else working in IT to do the same: those algorithms and data structures learned at the university sure came in handy and saved my ass many a time, producing small and fast software.