Friends of ours have a kid graduating high school this year. He's going to study (paid!) to be an auto mechanic rather than go to 4-year college. And both of his parents are the college-educated types where their kids would have, at most any other time, been sent off to college as "normal". It's becoming less and less valuable to go the "normal" college route for many, many reasons.
LOL. Twice. Nice catch. To your point, we had an engineering grad at the bowling center working as a mechanic. Took him over a year to secure a full-time job and just left us. He was an odd sort though. I bid good luck to his new empoyer and hope I never have to experience anythng he works on. Then again he can't finish tasks without getting side tracked by his own feet. Prob 98% of TnTech engineering grads have jobs waiting on them, at hte worst, by hte beginning of their last semester.
I get the joke; but 2 things to consider 1) Roman roads were basically able to ignore absolute surface smoothness. I’d you don’t have to ensure a smoothly spinning rubber wheel at Interstate speeds, you can do the surface with much ore durable materials (paving stone or brick) and 2) engineers can make recommendations, but they are constrained by what the contracting parties negotiated to spend. Like everything else, engineers have to answer to the bean counters who want to cut every possible corner, including road building materials (one reason SpaceX does so well is that Chief „engineer“ Musk can basically tell the bean counters to go jump in a lake of they recommend something stupid)
