The importance of university is largely divided by two opinions. Many believe university education should be more practical – equipping students with relevant knowledge and necessary skills. However, many others believe that higher education should focus more on theoretical academics and moral growth.
A larger number of the population would subscribe to the view that university should lean towards practical and hands-on learning. Practical education helps a student easily grasp a concept as they are using all their sense to learn. Field such as engineering, medicine, and architecture requires you to use your knowledge to contribute to society, which can be enabled through a more hands-on approach to learning during university years. Fields like this help us in our everyday lives, and life would have been much difficult had it not been for advances in these disciplines. On the other hand, subjects like history, theology, and philosophy lack pragmatic applications.
On the other side of the coin, the view that university should be theoretical is also quite popular. Theoretical studies predate much of written history. From ancient Greece to the lands of Cyrus and Ramesses, philosophy was a noble subject. Great thinkers, economists, and scholars, all stem from studying theoretical subjects. Although such fields do not always have a real world application, they were the forefathers to modern science and critical thinking.
Some people will give importance to a more practical and pragmatic approach to higher education, while others will lean towards a more theoretical and speculative to learning things. I believe there is no single solid answer to this. It is best to study subjects like engineering and medicine in a practical way, and subjects such as philosophy and history in a more theoretical way.