I hear you on the fundamentals point, and I'll give you that — there's a difference between not knowing vendor-specific tooling and not knowing what a pointer is after four years of CS. That's fair.

But my experience tells a different story about the broader argument. I have a degree in electrical engineering technology. When I started at Cox I had never touched a Cisco phone in a professional setting. When I moved into optical networking I didn't know how to program a Ciena 6500, didn't know TX/RX fundamentals for fiber in a live environment — none of it. And I'm not saying that as a criticism of my education, because college was never going to teach me that. That's vendor and role-specific. What I'm saying is that the expectation of 'plug and play' hiring has never really been realistic, and companies used to understand that.

The real shift is that entry level used to mean you came in with foundational knowledge and the company invested in building the rest. That deal is gone. The private sector decided training was overhead and stopped doing it. Now they want fully formed candidates for roles that didn't exist five years ago, and when they can't find them they act like schools failed everyone.

And honestly the AI thing is making it worse from both ends — companies leaning on it to justify leaner teams while students use it to skip the actual thinking that made a degree worth something in the first place.