I've been thinking about the whole mind-vs-career thing, too, ever since I read this article. My experience with the physics department was that we were being aimed carefully at several top graduate schools - the coursework and the subjects were all chosen to best prepare theoretical physics grad students for the years of work ahead.

Never mind that some of us didn't want to be theoretical physics grad students, but had to take all the courses to graduate. I didn't want to be an engineer, either - I wanted to be an experimental physicist, and there was almost no room for that stuff at Swat. The labs we did were almost grudgingly thrown in as an afterthought and I never learned anything from them.

If I had understood coming in the way the department operated, I wouldn't have gone to Swat, or I would have started pushing for my own special major sophomore year. They really did aim you at a specific kind of career, even if it wasn't necessarily a business/lucrative one.

Or, as Alex put it more generally: We got to ask Big Questions, but we were all expected to ask the same ones.