I'm curious where the gap was in the curriculum that made these students unable to grasp the fundamentals of how to write clean code. It seems unlikely someone spending all that time and money just "didn't care."

I started my university career as an architecture major. Looking back, I realized that the reason I dropped out is that the professors skipped over teaching about the craft of how to create good architectural drawings and how to physically build the models we were required to build even in the first semester.

If we can't get good code out of people who essentially have all the time in the world, we have no hope to get it out of people who are asked to move mountains in 2 weeks.