[ChuckMcM]

Well if you've ever taken a university class where they 'take you through' the topic, which is to say along the path that discoveries were made and then updated, you realize that they learned stuff originally that was wrong, and really smart people went off on really wild tangents that were a waste of time (sometimes provably). So going through a solid college program on engineering should 'move you through' the mistakes to get you close to state of the art, with an understanding of why those were mistakes, and why things are done the way they are now, and how to evaluate your progress with some tools like complexity analysis and to figure out how to break what seems like an impossible problem into achievable segments.

Good college students learn to ask a lot of questions and to learn from the answers.

That being said, people who don't 'go to school' but have a 'learning lifestyle' (which is to say always curious, always reading, always tinkering with a variety of ideas) can get just as good as any university student can. The challenge for them is to convince an employer that they are in fact well educated on the topics and tools they will be expected to use to do their job. If they start their own company, well they don't really have to convince anyone since the results speak for themselves.