For me at least, at a large public university with a highly-rated engineering department, it mostly came down to math courses being taught by TAs/new faculty who were not primarily interested in teaching.

When I had actual engineering dept courses on these topics (frequency domain comes to mind), I grok'ed it pretty quickly. But the math lectures were basically spent doing practice problems from the book, without any sort of insight or practical application.

I just wanted to build shit in college.