Pair programming worked well for me in college because my peers had about the same level of background knowledge and the goal was well defined. At my day job, pair programming doesn’t work as well, since the knowledge gaps in different parts of the system are too great. We don’t have a cohesive skill set.

But that's the entire point. Pair programming isn't for producing more working code in this session faster. It's that it empirically is the fastest way to erase knowledge gaps because the two of you are working on a shared artifact.