[zeteo]

There's no engineering without a solid theoretical background. You want to do civil engineering, they'll make sure you thoroughly understand Newton's laws; electrical, Kirchhoff's. And that's just the start. In fact, you're much better prepared to build big bridges if all you've studied is theoretical physics than if you had personally built a crossing over every ditch on campus.

[jeffreymcmanus]

Wait -- no engineering is possible? None at all? Really? Then how do you explain the success of high school dropout Benjamin Franklin?

The point of my post is not that theory is worthless (which I call out several times in the post). It's really that there is more than one way to learn this stuff and that most undergraduates pick out a sub-optimal path for cargo-cult reasons (such as the "halo effect" of elite universities which I also called out in the post).