Done with college many years ago, but for work I have to take what you may call trade school related courses (computer certification courses) at the junior college.
Anyway, this semester it's the course which supposed to prepare a student for Microsoft Windows Enterprise Infrastructure exam. I don't really care what I get on the "final" in school, but what really counts is if I pass the actual Microsoft certification test on the subject.
Next semester it's either Unix certification class or CompTIA Security+ class. The vast majority of students do OK in college while taking these courses if they stick it out but very few actually go for an industry standard test but instead use these courses as electives towards an associates or bachelor's degree in a different subject than anything related to computer hardware.
And like the best students I have seen in these classes in over the last ten years, it's never the computer science major who does best, but some random non-CS student (whether they are a doctor, high school kid in a gifted program with no idea of what they want to do, or an infantryman or sailor with 20 years in the service) who take a certification course just for the love of computers.
Not to knock Microsoft, but in over 200 units of courses taken from freshman to grad school, nothing has been drier, or more poorly written than actual Microsoft Press books about their own products' prep books for their certification tests.
