It is completely inexcusable that people in STEM fields are so reactionary, considering how capitalism utterly destroys science.
If universities were actually "left wing indoctrination factories" like the right thinks they are, every STEM grad would be taught, for example, what Kropotkin had to say about innovation.
Really, I think the coursework is meant to give one an intuition about how much to add or remove and where one can. This replaces breaking a whole bunch of stuff to learn the same intuition. You can see the hands-on types doing the latter as amateurs on YouTube. It seems that's how it worked for my electrical coursework even though there are some simple maths that often needs done.
I suppose the classes also make it so you can better understand what to use FEA on and how to understand the results.
If you talk to MEs, they often will say they feel they use such a small percentage of their schooling in their careers, probably because its mostly math that you never/rarely preform in the real world anyway. I only had one CAD course in years, and the computer based FEA class was an elective.
I'll be honest, I held the belief throughout college, and still do, that in all reality the way its taught ME could easily be a 2 year tech degree. I would have preferred it that way at least.
True, one forgets the math but learns the feel. How best do we teach the feel? I dunno.
And yeah, I agree that a lot of college degrees really could be way shorter. Maybe they could be shorter with more co-op like how some Euro schooling works.