Disclaimer: My only formal training in this field was TAFE in Australia, which involved an 18 month course and is roughly analogous to a trade school or community college, before that I was a high school drop out.
> We've reached an era where the average worker's serviceable time long outlives the competitive edge they've gained from their education/training in their formative years. The accelerating pace of economic and technological change is faster than ever, and this condition is unprecedented in human history.
I think when change is this fast understanding the basic building blocks is more important than ever. These don't change quickly, some haven't changed since the industry was born. So much technological change is just reinventing concepts that have existed for decades and once you realize you're staring at an old concept in a new package keeping up is much easier.
The question then is what educational format teaches these fundamentals the best. For some of them it probably is a computer science course but for others it might not be. One of the best classes I had was building our own database (TAFE was pretty hands on) and from what I've seen this was a lot better than how it's taught in many universities. We had to start at the file level and think through the various steps to make a half decent database, like what is required to handle index lookups efficiently, how to retrieve records in order, etc. It gives you a much more intuitive grasp of what steps a DBMS has to go through on your behalf. In my first real job after graduating I had to explain to someone with a CS degree why storing dates as strings was inefficient and making our monthly billing took half a day to generate instead of half a second.
Foundational knowledge is important but the where/when and how we obtain this knowledge could do with a shake up, you can produce a lot of valuable output without an upfront 3-4 year investment, but it doesn't seem like there are a lot of opportunities to gain it after becoming a full time worker.