Definitely agree with apprenticeship. I've learned more through a couple hours of pair programming with an experienced coder than I did at the university.
This isn't to say university is bad. Data structures, algorithms, etc.. should all come at an instructional level, but good design practices definitely come from coders.
As a side note, is there any sort of organized apprenticeship program, or are we dependent on introductory training at a job/Open Source level?
The FreeBSD project has an institutionalized mentor program. So before/when you are raised from just an occasional contributor (someone sending in occasional patches) to a commiter (someone with commit access) you are given a mentor, who teaches you the culture/process/methods to commit changes.
Not quite as good as a apprentice/mentor day-in day-out but it is supposed to work pretty well.
This isn't to say university is bad. Data structures, algorithms, etc.. should all come at an instructional level, but good design practices definitely come from coders.
As a side note, is there any sort of organized apprenticeship program, or are we dependent on introductory training at a job/Open Source level?