I'm forgetting the source, but some book I read discussed some period of silicon valley as a place where colleges quite routinely exposed students to chip-making. It sounded like the fabs of the area greatly supported these efforts. I'm not sure where I read it but it's stuck with me across many years, always strongly affirming my belief that people, when given exposure to how & means to do, begin many great things.
The main problem is there are only so many universities with so many sections therefore quite a lot of students don't get exposure, even within a given EE department. And even if they could offer it to all students, many wouldn't enroll, as you're basically doing this class constantly for like a year, for not that many credits relative to the time spent, as it sucks down just tons of hours as one gets familiar with all the nitpicky details that one needs to know. And as one learns to deal with the joy that is CAD tooling.
However, in my opinion, the experience in invaluable. And students that can pass that course, with a successful chip in hand, are hand picked by employers. We sure do.
EE272 at Stanford actually started to post their flow. Another benefit of the open source PDKs.
https://code.stanford.edu/ee272/skywater-digital-flow
There are actually many interesting student designs out there. For example this OoO RV64GC RISC-V core from Berkeley: https://chipyard.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Generators/BOOM.ht...
You can find a more detailed write-up of that course and other courses it inspired (as well as some of the practical challenges involved) in her retrospective in IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine [2].
An excerpt:
> "Importantly, these weren’t just any designs, for many pushed the envelope of system architecture. Jim Clark, for instance, prototyped the Geometry Engine and went on to launch Silicon Graphics Incorporated based on that work (see Fig. 16). Guy Steele, Gerry Sussman, Jack Holloway and Alan Bell created the follow-on ‘Scheme’ (a dialect of LISP) microprocessor, another stunning design."
[1] https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MIT78/MIT78.htm...