The reason you bother with them is and has always been to create future senior engineers that understand your business well enough to ensure business continuity.
Too many if not most can't even change a single sentence in their curriculum in 1-2 years.
It doesn't mean University isn't worth it, it's worth less if you aren't self-directed learner building things.
Maybe, just maybe, companies should invest into training again instead of outsourcing training to universities and saddle the prospects with the cost in the form of student debt? FFS we used to tell our children "if a job requires you to pay for entry, you're getting scammed" - and yet, we've all accepted it with "academia", "coding bootcamps" and god knows what else.
Universities should be a place for the gifted to advance science, not be degree mills for large companies too goddamn lazy and penny-pinching!
Extensive training made a lot more sense where people stuck around for 15-30 years but I expect a lot of people here would find that ludicrous.
There's nothing preventing a company from saying "hey, we're paying for your training and expecting 5 years of service in return, and in exchange for this, you get guaranteed 2-5% above inflation".
And if government would have some sort of sense, they would force companies to act like that again.
But nobody wants to set up programming trade schools or apprenticeships so shrug.
They weren’t a panacea either.
Universities aren’t vocational schools. An undergraduate education can, at best, teach you how to learn complex topics independently and give you foundational knowledge you can build upon later whether you’re going into industry, pursuing a PhD, or doing something unrelated.
The place for you to learn “practical” software development is an internship or an entry-level role, assisted with a lot of self-directed learning that hopefully university made possible for you.
They also universally advertise themselves for many programs that are current.
The "teaching you how to think" part isn't out of line at all, however, applying it in the real world has to be taken relative to what students are explicitly told before registering in university as to the outcomes they will achieve.
I was a TA in grad school and did some tutoring and some students just didn't have the math basics they needed. I could help with a few things but couldn't really teach remedial high school math.
One might argue that it might not be a bad idea to have apprenticeships like they do in traditional trade crafts. I'd argue that this is what the junior programmer role is.
Junior programmer roles are not internships or apprenticeships at all. Internships before the students graduate are internships.
Instead, asking an employer to act as the employee's parents, and pay to educate the new graduate so they can disappear in 1-2 years makes an increasingly harder choice.
This is part of the reason that Junior dev positions were not succeeding, prior to AI and the pandemic.