You got this right about engineering schools. My husband looks for old folks to hire because the new grads can’t do anything but sit at the computer. No hands on experience at all. And by “old folks” I mean our age. LOL
Engineering schools were pretty much destroyed by the mid 90’s. Now they’re just video game parlours. In 1995, the year my son was graduating from high school, I took him on a grand tour of all the engineering colleges in the Pacific Northwest. They all had great machine labs, foundries, etc, built in part with gummint surplus machine tools as well as promo deals from the tool makers. Schools get first choice of surplus tools, usually buying them for a buck$.
By 1995 it was all gone and buried. Each school had one small lab room with maybe a mill and a lathe, reserved for grad students who might actually have to make something. The huge machine rooms were being converted to office spaces. One of the large overhead hoists had a flower pot hanging on it.
As chance would have it one of the college deans was one of my classmates. I started to light him up about destroying the capability and he started to explain how companies wanted computer operators. A bell went off and he said he had to go teach a class, which saved his ass from an industrial grade rant I was about to lay on him about how we still need basic skills or those blue lights don’t mean much. One doesn’t hear much about those geeks he was breeding.
That same son tells me now that maybe one in ten of the engineering grads he interviews has enough of a skill set to justify the moving expense of hiring he/she/it.