I just got a phone call from a friend in his last quarter at a top 10 uni last night - he was stressed out because his research group hadn't actually written an

I just got a phone call from a friend in his last quarter at a top 10 uni last night - he was stressed out because his research group hadn't actually written any code yet. It was all copy pasted from other projects. They ran into some issues, and have no idea how the code base works and can't fix it. I think (on my experience) schools teach you syntax, and lots of history. Not much application.