It sounds like you went to an ivy league?
If you just wanted to learn differential equations or something there must be way more effective ways to do that, and it would free the engineering teachers to teach engineering to aspiring engineers, who are being turned away in droves to make space for City-fuel grads.
However, as they say, the market has spoken, especially in a country where "industrial policy" is either "lol" or "sell".
I am one of those disaffected STEM grads btw - T10 STEM program grad -> Engineering internships -> Policy Stint -> BSchool -> MBB -> Product Management
The business portion is easy to teach, and hiring for Finance+IB+VC+Consulting+PM roles is increasingly oriented only at STEM grads and BSchool grads from top programs (eg. BSBAs @ Haas, Wharton, Anderson, Ross, Stern)
To add to that, given when I went to school and the fact that I wasn't a CS major, I didn't touch a computer in undergrad. (Not literally true--I took a FORTRAN course which I didn't use until much later.) Never touched a PC until I was working and that was initially an Apple II we ran a couple of analysis programs on. But... like many of my classmates we ended up in the computer industry anyway.
>increasingly oriented only at STEM grads and BSchool grads from top programs
I assume the idea is that they have not only already been filtered by the schools, but they're presumably not dummies if they got the program with flying colors, we can do a sanity check that we can put them in front of clients, and teach them what they need to know.
Oh whoa! That industry definetly played (and still does) a big part in technology today. I heard a lot of stories about the HPC/Simulations and Networking research done by the ONG sector.
> we can do a sanity check that we can put them in front of clients, and teach them what they need to know
Exactly! That's how I do hiring for interns and new grad PMs as well! Also the added benefit of having technically adept candidates makes imparting domain specific knowledge easier (if I'm a Cybersecurity PM, I'd like to have someone with networking+os chops along with business sense)
But got in at a hot time and had a planned departure to grad school just as things were having a major downturn.