I recently, 12/2002, finished my Bachelor's in CS at Western Kentucky University. The curriculum there is very much based in theory. There are what we refered to as "245's". These classes would teach specific things like FORTRAN, COBOL, Java, PHP & XML. These were ...skill-based classes. I found this to be a good method of balancing the required theoretical curriculum with that of a skill-based one. You were only required to take 1-2 "245's" during your tenure.. but you could take as many as you wanted.

The latter two and a half years of my education proved immensely valuable in terms of theory and practicality. I wrote a shell to read a dos floppy in RAW mode in C, modded a learning virtual OS called "Nachos", a binary heap in C++, a Java class to perform most any standard operation on a matrix, wrote a POP3 Mail client in Ruby, and a "naughty-word" filter in ruby. Those were the more memorable ones. While some of these were ...choose your assignment and I'll verify that it is acceptable, they were still good assignments that I learned alot by doing. I still managed to keep a good hold on the concepts being taught in class, and see how to apply them to the programs I was developing.

The point of all that rambling is that if a CS degree is based in theory it doesn't keep you from applying the theory on your own.

Would I have gotten my current job w/o my degree... no way. People who assume, that having a higher education level in Computer Science means that you have no practical skills, bother me. If that were true, we could apply the converse and say that all those w/o higher cs degress have no knowledge of theory... which is simply not true.Any application of theory is an "excercise for the reader".