Well, one, or perhaps two, of the loudest critics of the 'educational system' here are most certainly not employable. They are, as evidenced by their writing, utterly incompetent. That means that penning a report to their superiors, writing a 'manual' for their customers, or sending an email that makes any sense whatever is essentially impossible.
'Oh, but this is just a forum' will be the response. That's BS. You can't write a sentence, you can't punctuate, you certainly cannot spell. Your performance in fora is judged as you would judge others.
As for 'knowing everything your employer needs you to know' when you graduate, I seem to have dim memories from the early '80s when, while reading one of the trade rags, it was mentioned that a company 'X' had hired someone away from their current employer, and was expecting them to take upwards of six (yes, kids, 6) months to be 'up to speed' on the product engineering. I'll die wishing I'd cut that one out.
And, perhaps, a few engineers would do well to take a humanities course, or two. I suspect they wouldn't get anything out of it - knowing as they do that they are the only rational thinkers (or, indeed, as one would have it, one of the few capable of 'thinking for themselves.' You might actually question the patron saint of 'engineers,' the delightful Ayn Rand, and the creature of her imagination, John Galt. Oh, and by the way, remember that her 'engineers' were about to do that most terrible of things, and 'strike.' The simplest, low-grade 'humanities' course might draw your attention to Rand's childhood and her imagining of 'engineers, perhaps both fantasy and reality Those engineers, funded, trained, driven, oh, and executed, by the state, dragged Russia into the industrial world.
You want kids (I'd be at least a 'grand-parent' now, had the kids I didn't have, had kids, at the age I was making sure (is that 'engineering') I didn't have the little tykes) to only get in to engineering if they can run a soldering iron? As proof of ability? How about getting in to medical school? Hmmm. Does playing doctor count?
I sat in a very interesting class when I went to university - 'A History of the Philosophy of Science' - where students who were about to graduate with a degrees in chemistry, physics, and mechanical engineering learned two things; 'science' is not value free, we don't arbitrarily just study something as if interest was sui generis, we study it because it is socially viable. We study electronics engineering not only because we like solder smoke, but because there is a vast array of social capital connected with being 'an engineer' rather than a repairman. For those who don't believe me - toss your business card, when someone asks what you do, say 'I'm essentially a glorified TV repair technician' - you'll feel the difference. The second thing these young bunnies learned was that they were going to have to write. Yes. Words. More than three to six pages of intellectually coherent scribbling, they were going to have to collate the lab technicians' reports in to something that would be readable upstairs, by the marketers, bean-counters, managers. Interesting, isn't it, that people who don't necessarily know how to solder actually control the lives of those who do?
And some plug 'engineers' as knowing... well, having served my apprenticeship in a shipyard as a machinist when I was much younger, I learned that engineers cannot read general arrangement drawings provided by (in this case) bearing manufacturers. Nor, in a separate instance, could they determine that a spool of 'X' width, at 'Y' radius, plain and simply would not fit in to the box they themselves had designed. Oh, the engineer wasn't quite wet behind the ears, being somewhere in his '50s at that time.
It also occurs to me, thinking back on both 'humanities courses' and Ayn Rand, that her appeal to engineers (broadly speaking here) is why stuff is not only made in China, but in ever great quantities, designed there - 'rational thinking,' and a very laissez-faire approach to costs...
Urn
Certificate of Qualification (Red Seal to U.S. readers) Machinist/82
Inter-Provincial Qualification as above
BA 04 (First Class)
and enough other stooopid-ass qualifying bits of rag to paper my shop wall