I think this line of thinking is a fallacy. All of the classroom learning in the world won't do you an ounce of good without the experience to give you a real education. What we need is more experienced opticians mentoring apprentice opticians, not fewer. It's just as easy for there to be an incompetent professor spouting misinformation as there is someone in an office setting. I know; I went to college for six years. I had my share.
My background is in psychology; I can tell you that all of the classroom learning and "education" I received over the course of my four year BS program didn't prepare me at all for actually setting down and dealing with someone suffering from a mental illness. It was that disparity between thinking I was prepared and finding out that no one had prepared me at all that led to my reassessing my career plans and not pursuing a PhD.
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