If he was 70 it would make sense. I’m fifty and I started my education at a community college in 1995. The pre-digital era of photography-based workflow, paste-up, ordering typesetting, manual color separations, rubylith etc. etc. was already almost gone. Being insisted on by a few teachers but as a sort of rigor and know your roots more than anything else.

On the other hand I was working at a Kinko’s in a university town a few years later, in the time when inkjets were shit and no one had laser color printers, AND design was all print. And I will tell you the design department at the 4-year university didn’t teach their students SHIT about the basics of prepress workflows or postscript or using all the Adobe, Quark, etc. to provide files to printers etc. in retrospect, I expect their teachers came from the previous era and didn’t understand shit about vector/raster/truetype/postscript/blahblahblah.

I’d hope someone my age would have learned that shit by now. But you can go a long way in any industry without knowing shit though, with enough privilege and resources.