This is the point where people from my neck of the woods (Ontario, and, frankly, most of Canada) suffer severe cognitive dissonance. We have two very different post-secondary tracks, and around these parts a "college" in colloquial parlance is a diploma-granting institute aimed at providing students with marketable skills (technicians, technologists, accountants, nurses who have no aspirations to teach nursing later). The programs may be two or three years, but they are all identifiable by their practical applicability. (The full designation of such institutions is "Colleges of Applied Arts and Technology".) Quite apart from that, we have the Universities which, apart from a few professional programs (medicine/dentistry, law, etc.), come with no promise of applicability whatever. (And even professional degrees are merely preparation for practical situations that will eventually lead to real certification. A BEng degree doesn't make you an engineer, a PEng certification does, and so on.
The point is that, from my perspective, more people should probably be going to college rather than to University. It's not that we don't need thinkers, but that we need more thinkers that can translate thought into action.
Clear goals. Different goals require distinct methods to achieve them. College and University. Perhaps we need more ways to teach and educate people. Ideally one desire thinkers than can translate things into action, but while this is a goal, why don't we try to find the way to give every student the best way to build a good education?
That's more-or-less the point of the two tracks. To put in in a frame that will be familiar to most of the readers here, the study of computability (computer science) is a fascinating theoretical pursuit that has some practical application in the real world, but that theoretical base is often glossed over in the rush to produce "qualified" programmers. Here, at least, the coder stream is in one track (with a sound theoretical base), while the mathematical and electrical engineering streams are in the other. There's nothing preventing a computer scientist from learning to code, nor is there anything keeping a diploma-toting programmer from pursuing mathematics further, it's just far less likely that a kid going into a computer science program is going to expect to emerge from the program as a code monkey or that one entering a programming stream will be wondering when the damned algebra is going to end.
The point is that, from my perspective, more people should probably be going to college rather than to University. It's not that we don't need thinkers, but that we need more thinkers that can translate thought into action.
EDIT: closed paren to avoid major bug.