I’m a pure math student though. Math students tend to have way more flexibility in what they study. You can take extremely rigorous courses like functional analysis and algebraic topology. Or you can do a math-based accounting program and pretty much stop taking hard math courses after first year.
In other words, you're at a school that cheats on the rankings. (As the saying goes, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a measure.)
Engineering programs are a bit different, and more interested in making sure the floor is high. More like medicine in that they are concerned that a certified professional should be competent.
1. The art of listening to music
2. Geographic Information Systems
Both courses were pretty much impossible to fail.
The first course expanded my musical horizons and led to me enjoying almost any genre of music, whereas before I had listened to only a few select genres. Huge QoL improvement.
The 2nd course had proven useful whenever the topic of mapping has come up, which includes understanding property lines and real estate.
A bunch of smart people work at universities who are there to teach students stuff. It is up to the students to learn.
When I talk about students taking bird courses, I mean the kind where they never show up to class and just memorize a bunch of stuff before the midterm. They walk away with an 80, completely satisfied, having learned nothing.
Seems to me, that is like paying for a nice steak dinner, coming in, sitting down, eating the potatoes, then leaving.
Like, why? The point of college is to learn things. Balancing course load is important, but not learning at all is just a waste of time.
And, to be clear, I'm not talking about hard math. I tutored some first year students at one point and, with no exaggeration, they mostly couldn't do high school algebra or really grok a supply demand curve in microeconomics. There were a few business school memoirs written around that time and it was invariably about the struggles of someone who couldn't handle math.
Other than that, it was a fair bit of work but it wasn't really hard.
While those two goals are not antithetical to each other, it is not at all a secret. I would say engineering/STEM schools are openly designed to get students good jobs. But good engineering schools don not have "bird courses", the number of mandatory classes to electives is really high.
If you are at a school where students are doing the behavior you say, perhaps you are at the wrong institution or degree program. For example, I have heard rumors that business-area degrees tend to attract people who just want to buy their way to a credential.