The strawman that makes your argument so brittle is that there are only two positions on the spectrum. The school of technology at Purdue has some of the brightest people I've ever encountered. What makes them extra luminous is their ability to spot common pitfalls novices run into. They learned this by being engineers in industry. Thus, those educators are supremely positioned to find the struggling adulthood novices that are good at fundamental academic skills, and keep them on the path.
Just like Ford Motors tried to convince everyone that they were the best, they eventually believed their own ad copy, and got entrenched in making cars the way that had always made them. And then all of Ford's competitors reverse engineered his logistics, and said "if your time to you is worth saving, then you better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone, for the times, they are a changing".
It worked for Bob Dylan pretty well too, when popular music was dominated by Elvis Presley.
Just like Ford Motors tried to convince everyone that they were the best, they eventually believed their own ad copy, and got entrenched in making cars the way that had always made them. And then all of Ford's competitors reverse engineered his logistics, and said "if your time to you is worth saving, then you better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone, for the times, they are a changing".
It worked for Bob Dylan pretty well too, when popular music was dominated by Elvis Presley.