There are, of course, exceptions, but programming in industry is typically a design job. Your focus is on designing an infrastructure for the application that will allow it to be functional and maintainable, and survive massive refocusing of scope without determent to the prior two points. Things like compilers, HTTP proxies, and OS kernels are plugged into the infrastructure, not written as part of it.

Your concern, as an industry programmer, is not whether merge sort of bubble sort is the right algorithm for your problem; you will just hand that off to the built-in sort function. Your concern is whether or not MVC is the right design pattern for your application. Again, there are exceptions, but that is fairly typical of the average programming job.

So while you might pick up some design skills during your study in a CS degree, it is not the focus of the program. That is where the meme comes from.

I went to CMU and can confirm this. I coded a shell, filesystem and kernel just in that one OS class. To anyone who thinks this doesn't prepare you for something just because the focus was on the OS abstractions, algorithms and concurrency instead of "good coding design", you are mistaken.

Universities teach math-like computer science instead of OOP/Code style/Agile/etc because it is much harder. You can learn OOP and the rest on the job. College is meant to broaden you as a person, to teach you to think -- not teach you to do a specific skill set. Not all of them can do it, and not all students want to learn this way, but the dream is still pretty great.

Interestingly this is the opposite of what apprenticeships are for. They teach you a skill set from master to student. Perhaps these two systems have less in common then we originally thought. Should the comparison be between apprenticeships and vocational schools?