Sure they do - it's just different stuff.
The kids today play with Raspberry Pi and similar micros the way our generation had the Radio Shack "50-in-1" electronics kits. Today's kids can whip up a website or assemble a PC in their sleep, they just don't have a clue about the voltage drop across a diode junction or the bias for a vacuum tube.
Heh... I guess I'm in between generations on this one. I started my EE degree in the 90s, had to leave, came back and finished in 2011. I know voltage drop across a diode, but nothing about vacuum tubes except for the applications in which they might be useful.
I still had to take Statics, Dynamics, Thermodynamics, Heat Transfer, Materials, etc... Because "engineer". (Never mind that the non-EEs only had to take one basic EE course.
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Still, as a hiring manager I would have liked to know that certain fundamentals were covered. It drove me nuts to find recent EE graduates who didn't know how an electric motor worked. I had one young lady tell me, "I can write some great firmware to control your house, but I have no clue how electricity makes it to your wall socket." I had to run a series of training courses to teach our new-hires things that should have been covered in college.
The trick is... Which fundamentals?
Personally, I also think my knowledge of motors is abysmal. We had one course to take on the subject, "Electromechanical Energy Conversion". But it was much heavier on the math than on the physical principles involved, and frankly it really didn't stick because of that.
Personal opinion - a 4-year bachelor's is no longer adequate for engineering. We really need to move to a 5 or 6 year program. But as long as industry is willing to hire engineers with only 4, students will go to schools that offer the programs and get hired. A change would have to be forced by ABET, phased in over time, but I don't see it happening.
You're on to something there... However, I think what's going on is that we as humans have gained a level of knowledge and technology that changes what is important.
Same thing is happening in IT. In the 80s, 90s, and maybe into the early 2000s it was possible to be a "computer guy" and kind of do everything. I started an IT business in the 90s and sold it in the early 2000s and we did everything: Desktop support, server administration, databases, web development and hosting, network infrastructure design and installation, anything we could get our hands on.
Today, IT is both wider and deeper. Take the above, add cloud services, IoT, information security, business intelligence/analytics, automation, AI, etc... There are 2-3 more people in the C suite these days rather than just one "Manager" for IT.
Same thing has happened with EE. In the 50s EE was power systems. Now, there's microcontrollers and embedded systems, computer engineering and architecture, integrated circuits, and plenty of other specialties you can get into.
I think what's really going on with curriculums is that they're struggling with the width and depth. For example, I had to do plenty of stuff with op-amps, 555 timers, and simple logic gates. How much of that is there in the real world today? Do we really need to go deep on how to design an op-amp, or is that a problem we've gained enough knowledge on to basically consider it "solved" to where we can build on others' work if necessary?
When I took my second semester programming and data structures class, our final project was to write a complete enrollment and registration system for a university - from scratch. We wrote every library we called, every class of objects we used, every dang subroutine... And for what? Today, that same class seems to be structured in a much smarter way, where they're allowed to use existing classes and libraries, because that's what you do in the real world!
So, IMO, as time marches on, I think engineering schools need to continuously consolidate the lower end classes while offering more higher end specialty classes as well as teaching students how to learn the skills that they need to learn new subjects. One of the instructors I had for a couple of my classes at the very end (Integrated Circuits and VLSI) did something quite cool - He said "You'll never be able to learn everything you need to know for an engineering career in school. You need to continually learn new things based on new research and technology." So for his class, there was a single exam about 2/3 of the way through the semester for half the grade, and the other half of the grade was to go learn something new that related to the class material and showed your knowledge of the class material. It had to be based on at least two IEEE papers that were less than 10 years old and you had to write a paper on it AND give a presentation on it (another skill that students don't often get to exercise). That was both enjoyable and educational... And one of mine was on the development of glass cockpits and the technologies that enabled them to make their way into GA cockpits.
On that note, it wasn't long after graduating I realized I have a deeper respect for people who are self-taught in many of these subjects, largely because it means they actually wanted to know it. They wanted to know how things work and they learned it despite no academic/tangible career track benefit conferred by acquiring a degree. Especially the case in compsci/engineering and even finance.
This is one of the things that always drove me nuts in school. I wanted to truly understand everything I was learning... And it really wasn't always taught that way. To me, knowing book answers and accepting them without understanding the underlying principles just wasn't worthwhile. So, I spent a lot of extra time to develop that understanding, often to the detriment of just exercising the "book knowledge" in an attempt to get better exam grades... And the knowledge wasn't always there by the time the exam happened. So, I did not have a great GPA, but I felt like I learned a lot more than some of my friends who had stellar GPAs.
When I finally went back to finish, it finally dawned on me how much college is geared towards just regurgitation and BS. I got much better grades, but I didn't LEARN as much.
I hear ya. Two of the worst hires I ever inherited were from Columbia and MIT (the latter with an advanced comp sci work). And the absolute, bar-none worst was from Princeton (lasted not even 50 days on the job before fired by executive mgmt). It's not just because of those three but my collective post-college experience has taught me that academic pedigree means very little. It might mean more to venture capitalists looking for the next Stanford Alum startup, cuz it makes a good story, but in practice I think it has a 0.0 correlation with job performance and maybe only a loose connection to intelligence. Though, important to remember: intelligence != efficacy in the working world.
This. I've gone back to look up some of my high-GPA acquaintances from college, and none of them lasted very long in engineering. And that is why every time I see a job listing that requires a 3.0 GPA, I cringe a little. Those aren't necessarily the folks you're looking for...
