Corporate Uni?

I was thinking yesterday, about how if you learn a skill and don't use it, you lose (forget) it. I think this has been one of the major benefits that an apprenticeship has over a university degree. For some reason though, many employers still favour university graduates. I understand that completing a university degree demonstrates commitment to a task, but would 3-5 years not be better spent learning skills that we remember?

For hard-diciplines, such as Law and Medecine, this is exactly what happens. You are taught the knowledge that you are required to know in order to legal matters (for example), and much of the course is demonstrating that you have a grasp of the principles and are capable of justifying a point of view legally.

Lets contrast that to a BA or BCom. In my BA, I've touched on everything from Accounting, to Strategising; From Finance to Law. Now a BA is designed to be generic. But people who do a BCom specialize in one field - this is where most of our Accountants, Financial Officers etc come from. In this case, why is there so much time spent on erroneous information they do not directly use? If you wanted your Finance department to have a "reasonable" knowledge of accounting, send them to a seminar at your own expense! That way, they will learn information they use straight away. By learning it at the 1st year uni level, by the time we graduate, we've forgotten it anyway, and have to relearn it at your expense again!

Perhaps university would benefit from being more generic, shorter courses (i.e. just the 1 year), and when you choose a "major" or dicipline (depending on what course you are studying, same thing though), you actually work with a company in that industry who trains you for that field. Civil Engineers would do generic maths and physics in the first year, then spend 3 years honing that theory in the field with people who know what is going to be used and what is not!

One day, I'll start a corporation that does this :)