Career vocational software craftsman here. Academic background in math and science have served me well as I self-taught all the CS and application development skills I have collected over the years. Vocational training probably would not have hurt, but I don't see how it could fit a traditional curriculum; I have only accelerated my pace of learning as the internet and quality of free tools and instructional material have grown, and I attribute that entirely to the buffet nature of online training.
Well, what I wanted to say was that the "craft", i.e. skills learned when working on a real project with experienced developers, is something I use all the time. Academic knowledge less so. Take, for example, complexity theory. I use that once a day or even less. And in 95% of those cases I could just consult a simple cheat sheet (stuff like "sorting is O(n log n)").
