Institutional vs. Individual Investors [Opinion]

I often meet many individual investors who day trade as their 'jobs.' Many of them are/were university drop-outs or skipped university all-together. An undergraduate, more specifically finance, degree is accompanied by many life and formal/established technical/fundamental knowledge that these day-traders may miss out on.

Institutional investors have tremendous resources [Data-scrubbing tools, in-house research teams, access to corporate management, etc] that individual investors do not, generally, have access to.

My question: Do you think that they making a mistake when they could have gone down the traditional AM route?

Additional food for thought: https://www.mfs.com/content/dam/mfs-enterprise/mfs...
Context: I am a sophomore undergraduate majoring in Finance and minoring in CS.