The importance of university is largely divided into 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 large number of the population would subscribe to the view that university should lean toward practical and hands-on learning. Practical education helps a student easily grasp a concept as they are using all their senses to learn. Fields such as engineering, medicine, and architecture require one to use one’s knowledge to contribute to society, which can be enabled through a more hands-on approach to learning during university years. Fields like these help us in our everyday lives, and life would have been much more difficult without advances in these disciplines. On the other hand, subjects such as history, theology, and philosophy lack pragmatic applications.
On the other side of the coin, the view that university education 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 stemmed from studying theoretical subjects. Although such fields do not always have real-world application, they were the forefathers of modern science and critical thinking.
Some people will give importance to a more practical and pragmatic approach to higher education, while others will lean toward a more theoretical and speculative approach to learning. I believe there is no single solid answer to this question. It is best to study subjects such as engineering and medicine in a practical way, and subjects such as philosophy and history in a more theoretical way.