Also there might be another reason for this trend and its humanware. When I first started college there was a high percentage of engineering profs with industrial experience. (Even my physics department has some!), now they are as rare as gainfully employed French Literature majors. So an unspoken reason could be, too many professors in the curriculum decision making process with no idea what real industrial-grade engineering is. You have engineering profs who have been on a college campus from eighteen on. many with their world outlook still stuck at 18.
Now mix in the very high number of foreign profs who are not very likely to have an American industrial experience either (or any industrial experience particularly if they com from country where a sharp rock & stick is high tech!) and you have a recipe for increasing educational irrelevance.
I worked for Brown and Root for awhile a couple of years after getting out of the Army, we were technical maintenance in a Hercules chemical plant.
I was surprised at how similar the fresh engineers were to second lieutenants, generally they were dumber than dishwater for the first year or two as they had all the theories, but the old techs had to explain to them why they wouldn’t work in the real world.
I was surprised to learn that the older engineers had adopted so many hands on hobbies, it seemed as though they felt the importance of actually involving themselves in hands on challenges, the old timers were much more humble and receptive to practical input than the young guys.