The thing about some of these institutions you've named is that they make it possible for a student who has been working to continue to work, focus on some sort of degree program, and finish without letting his family starve, rather than the quality of education obtained there on average. I've seen some really bright people come out of those schools, but I'm not persuaded their quality reflects the quality of those institutions.

The way things have gone over the past 50 years, education and employment opportunity have taken divergent paths. Sadly, the focus in engineering training has left the "broad" education behind, in order to focus on technology that's surely obsolete by the time the student graduates. Along with that, I believe the focus has gone away from understanding "why" things work as they do, in order to focus on "how" things work. This makes it more difficult to move ahead along with the technology. If the emphasis is off the language arts, communication suffers. That, IMHO, is a big problem.

RE