Don, I can identify with your post from first hand experience. When I entered the university in 1965 every entering ME student took Graphics 1&2, a semester of Casting & Welding, and a semester of Machine Shop. There were two old WWII metal buildings housing working shops, including a lineup of engine lathes that we worked, even learning to cut threads on the lathe. In the second year the Metalurgy class had a three hour lab each week where we took alloy samples, mounted them in resin and then polished them to a high luster before etching them with a mild acid to expose the grain structure - all this to duplicate what we were reading about in the book. After two years I left school, ended up in the Navy for four years and then worked a couple of years before I got brave enough to go back and finish my degree. I had been gone six years, and when I went back the programs had been totally revamped - no more drafting classes (engineers tell the drafters what to draw), no more intro to machine processes shop classes, no more metalurgy lab, and no more Sr Engineering Projects to graduate (I had watched in awe in '66 when a graduating Senior was cutting a ring gear for his differential as his Senior Design Project!!) Everything was in the books now, and the labs were pretty tame, doing canned experiements to demonstrate some theory or another. One bright spot was a thermo professor who had a side-line consulting business, and in lab one day he had us running a complex set of steam table calcs, and once we had about a dozen points he wandered back in, asked us to plot the results and discuss what it might represent. That profile represented the phase change from water to steam with changing pressure - turned out he had a contract to design the ideal spray nozzle for a car wash, and he was looking at varying the storage temp and pump pressure to stay just below the steam point. Never did find out how much he made from our afternoon of lab work, but I never forgot the lesson....