4 years of full-time undergrad is not far from that. It certainly varies per university but where I'm at you have to take 5 classes per semester, 2 semesters a year for 4 years to get an engineering degree, with the expectation each class will take 8-10 hours of your time a week (predictably very few students finish on time), for 17 weeks each semester, for around 7000 hours of work.

You then need 2-3 years of supervised work before you are considered to be a full engineer.

On the computer science side if you don't go for engineering, you have just as many classes, and you're generally not considered to be a real, productive software engineer out of college.

In another country I studied in, to get a CS degree you need 5 years of specialized postsecondary education, and 6 for engineering (highschool ends a year sooner). That's 8500 to 10200 hours of full-time specialized postsecondary education, only for you to be considered barely useful when you come out.

I think it's less about bigotry towards plumbers and more about prejudice towards cops.