yes. the traditional German educational system for engineering also combines theoretical with practical=handson learning....
you are almost always certain that a graduate can do the job well
in USA, most of the engineering colleges have abandoned 90% of the handson learning, as one grad of the country’s leading engineering college put it... I can do operational calculus and explain semiconductor physics.... but they didn’t even teach me which end of a soldering iron to pick up (or that it needs to be plugged in)
so many grads of USA engineering schools CANNOT do the job well.... this is one of the reasons many corporations try to import foreign workers (yes, they do work for less money, but often they arrive here CAPABLE OF DOING THE WORK a lot better, too)
I had occasion to visit a VERY TOP TIER USA engineering college not that long ago.. .they still had an impressive older building filled up with engineering equipmnt (a hands on learning lab from maybe 30 years prior). It was locked up and eventually the university just knocked it down .... the students there get ZERO handson learning (except for plugging in some wires to connect things together in an impressive donated computer lab)
its such a limited education... its EXCELLENT for what it does but.... its so bookish.... so theoretical...and SO LACKING IN ANY PRACTICAL SKILL Learning Opportunities... that the grads just joke about (what else can they do) how incredibly incompetent they are at actually DOING so much engineering work in the Real World
we need to get back to a better balance in our educational system... yes, more like the traditional German system
just saying.....
I reflect on the work of the Wright Brothers. Wilber the largely self-taught brains of the operation and Orville, a first rate technician. The way they did things should be a model for an engineering school. What is amazing is the way that Wilbur was able to look at the literature and discover that, so often, the literature gets it all wrong. God gavels these opposing thumbs for a reason. Werner von Braun had a similar experience, starting out as a young man he ends up being persuading Hitler of the need of the V-I, by opening up the vision of space travel. Give Hitler this much credit: he was open to such stuff. Von Braun had no way of testing except by doing. Failure after failure. Finally he put himself in danger by leaving his bunker and stood outside so he could observe a rocket in flight and see what they were doing wrong.
I have long maintained that those who design cars, for example, should be required to actually spend time working on the products of their engineering expertise.