> The difference between trade schools and universities is in the depth of fundamentals.

It's definitely nonsense. You're failing to understand that today's "fundamentals" are not the parlour tricks you have in mind. You're in a better position to get ahead in providing software development services if you're able to put together a customized script that launches traefik, nginx, rabbitmq and a few nodejs services fully dockerized than if you're able to tell what opcodes your compiler generated out of C code.