Again, I am going to have to disagree with you. We were required to take two senior level courses that they termed 'culminating design experience' courses. My two were in digital circuit design and mechatronics. In the digital circuit design course we designed, from start to finish, a 32 bit MIPS ALU that we actually had fabricated and validated. In the mechatronics class we built and demonstrated an autonomous blimp that was tasked to drop balls into boxes located around a room. Each team built everything from scratch - the mechanical design of the blimp, image recognition software, navigation software, etc. These courses taught me by far the most useful stuff that I have used since graduation, and also consumed far more of my time than any of my theory courses. Maybe courses like that are not typical in an EE curriculum, but my younger brother was also an EE major at a different university and he had a similar experience.
Well, all I can say is that you and your brother were lucky ... and whoever hired you are luckier, still. 
