Well companies always ask for experience in their specific architecture. You can often figure out what CPU's a company is using by that style of vacancies.
There will always be niche choices for particular products. Few months ago I talked to a company that were using DSP Blackfins for data acquisition. No filtering or processing on the device (that was done a PC conveniently).. just grabbing data from an A/D at a few 100kHz and putting that over USB, ethernet or onto FLASH. One of their reasons was that SPI bus pins were not multiplexed with other functions, which could compromise the I/O allocation.
From my outside perspective I couldn't see why it won't run on a fast ARM chip in a big package (they were using BGA chips anyway), but they chose not to.
You may also need to support legacy products once a while. You think you're all set with these fancy cortex m4 chips that have tons of ram, half a dozen hardware breakpoints, data breakpoints, etc. All the tools in the world to debug them.
Then one day you jump back in time to the ARM7TDMI core (e.g. to solve a customer ticket) and curse everytime that you're using all of the 2 hardware breakpoints available, have got no data breakpoints, that you can't find a 1K buffer in that 16K of RAM for a serial trace module, and the quirks of an older architecture (like slow interrupts or lack of DMA).
I don't think age is much of an indication of relevance for a platform in an educational environment. If you look at academic then alot of times the MIPS core is being thought in computer architecture, design and engineering because of it's licensing model. Nevertheless it's a working 32-bit CPU core that is used in the industry, although a lot more seldom than ARM.
If you want to work with more cutting edge stuff, especially in microcontrollers or FPGA world, then pick up a development board for 20-100$ and get coding. I'm pretty sure that for a college student even a 25$ Nucleo board can provide tons of (software) projects to show of your proficiency in embedded programming.