Lots of people, both students and faculty, think of the university as sort of a glorified trade school, where the objective is to learn specific information and skills. And indeed, certain courses, such as beginning foreign languages and many mathematics courses, do fit this model. Looked at as a way of teaching specific information and skills, though, one has to judge university education as being, on the whole, spectacularly ineffective. At best, most students in mathematics courses, for example, become competent at doing homework problems. Fortunately, most jobs don't involve any of the knowledge or skills that were explicitly taught at college, anyway.
Most jobs have their own set of knowledge and skills.
The University as a Simulation of the Corporate World. In any formal or semi-formal teaching, there are always two conflicting paradigms being carried out simultaneously. The first one is a capitalist paradigm, where the teacher functions as a boss who assigns work , for which the students earn credit. In this model, the student comes to a teacher because he has a desire to learn something, and the works cooperatively with the student to help him achieve his goal. I think that both these paradigms are always at work to some extent, but in my experience, the capitalist paradigm is always by far the domininant one in our system of formal education, whereas the cooperative model is much stronger in the many classes I have experienced outside the academic system.