We bees to put injection molding machines in schools, CNC machines cutting the tooling, teach people how to make real things in real factories with realistic costs.
This is the expertise that left these shores 20 years ago. Tooling manufacturing, automation, semiconductor etc.
So at least some of our students are being given the opportunity, and there are multiple paths to success, but maybe the largest difference is that while truly talented multi disciplinary young engineers (and I work with a few) are rare, they always have been. The real questions are probably around social issues, does giving your kid a phone remove the boredom that encourages them to tinker with stuff in the garage, is there a sweet spot of being able to afford an old car, but to poor to pay to fix it, force kids to learn hands on repair skills. Does being able to stop at radio shack/surplus/frys/metal supply/etc and browse racks of stuff on the way home from school encourage kids to build stuff to impress their friends, or is having it delivered in the mail enough. AKA, like me the other day, I stopped a microcenter to get a pedestrian computer peripheral I could have ordered from amazon, but discovered a ESP camera module that gave me 'ideas'.
3D printing is an excellent introduction to just making an actual object in the real world. It's cheap and accessible, and has obvious design limitations to fall into and learn from. The step from 3D printing to full CNC is a lot less than the step from nothing to 3D printing.
I think what most changed music and mechanics was the transition from suburbia to flatsharing in the city centers.
3D printing would be good too, because on the surface it's just "model -> filament -> extruder -> built". But as anyone who has done 3D printing knows, it's constantly fighting 20 different parameters to try and coax your print to actually work out well. And even when you have it nailed down there are still 20 different things that can randomly sabotage it. And even with all that accounted for you still sometimes get off prints.