Dream Employers for Engineering Students - Real?

I can see it being real. Outside of Silicon Valley and tech hubs (including people who tend to follow these things), the majority of the world are not focused on the companies often written about in Techcrunch or posted on HN.

Although my experience is not representative of everything else, almost all of my friends who aren't into startups, HN, or anything like it (even if they are engineers or entrepreneurs of some form), out of college wanted to work for companies like Microsoft, Boeing, Intel, and others along those lines. A lot of it has to do with two things (these are my assumptions):

1. They only consider companies that are huge and within the area where they reside (the companies above were base on people living in Oregon and Washington).

2. They're the companies that are often talked about (no one were talking about any of the exciting startups (even huge ones) back then. And today, I can't see anyone there talking about Square or Github or Tesla either (unless they're living nearby and those are the companies often talked about.

So its not abnormal for me to see people wanting to work for the companies on that list.