My experience in studying Elec Eng at Melbourne as an undergrad was 25 years ago, so it would be monstrously unfair of me to answer this question.
I’ll do it anyway.
See how my bio says “former Sessional Lecturer at University of Melbourne”? That was in Linguistics, not Elec Eng. 🙂
That’s on me: I enrolled in Science/Engineering because it had the highest entrance score in the state and because I liked maths, not because I tinkered with a soldering iron. (I actually did get some electronic kits back in the day, but they didn’t maintain my interest.)
But still: Melbourne when I went through was utterly theoretical—and not even Good theoretical; it was much more “shut up and learn the formula” than not. They didn’t push practical anything particularly. Everyone knew that RMIT was where you got that kind of exposure, and that RMIT had the real industry links.
Of course, I got my degree in the middle of the Keating recession, and there weren’t a whole lot of jobs about in Australia in Elec Eng. But almost every one of my peers ended up a programmer instead. Which was the Science bit of their Science/Engineering degree.
Interested to hear if that’s changed.