Although knowing how to write algorithms is a very fundamental part of programming (and they SHOULD cover that in a CS degree), I'd agree with the young developers in not writing their own implementations in the real world. Writing good algorithms is hard and I'd prefer the expert developers to put the most useful algorithms into libraries rather than the less experienced developers who are straight out of college.
I reckon most coding jobs only really involve manipulating/displaying data from databases and having a nice GUI and you don't really need to be expert with algorithms for that.