iab, I do think that some things are better learned in an academic environment, but you could probably compress a lot of that into a shorter program. The class I had that I think benefited me in a pure academic setting were: art/architectural history, writing, presentation/public speaking (was an elective, but great for creative people to take), classical figure drawing, 2d theory, 3d theory. Pretty much everything after that could have been an apprenticeship, but rapid viz, model making, and CAD were nice to take as separate classes without the pressure of having to learn on a client. I don’t think most clients or corporations would want to pay to train their apprentices. Even if they were unpaid apprenticeships, they would be taking your senior designer and design manager’s time, during their hours.