There was a time when I saw a lot of people coming to class carrying a Mac. This seems to be over now.
If you study electrical engineering you very likely have to program micro-controllers and stuff. This requires at least a USB-A port. The same goes for USB-Sticks that students hand around in class. Not everybody is part of the same cloud system. So the next generation of engineers are lost to Apple.
That's a tad melodramatic, don't you think?
What is on the other end of that USB-A cable to the micro-controller? Is it an RS-232 port, Micro-USB, Mini-USB, completely proprietary? Genuinely curious, because you can get any of these standardized (RS-232, Micro-USB, Mini-USB), non-proprietary cables with USB-C on the other end by doing a simple Google search or a product search on Amazon. Even with a proprietary cable, you should be able to use a USB-C to USB-A dongle without issue.
Flash sticks with USB-C
and USB-A on them are now pretty common (I have a SanDisk Ultra one myself - $12.99). Anyways, there's also a little something called AirDrop on Macs, iPhones and iPads. Sure, not everybody is part of a Cloud-based system, but don't most reputable Universities have systems for helping student communicate with each other?
Honestly, if there are students that have been accepted to study electrical engineering that cannot find simple cable solutions by Googling or searching Amazon to find a USB-C substitute for the USB-A cable they need, perhaps they should consider a different field of study altogether.
I would like to think that if these students are smart enough to get into an Electrical Engineering school and are there to learn to build the next generation of ICs, CPUs, wireless modems, etc, that they would already possess some basic
electrical skills like soldering, reading schematics, working with bread boards, reading a Fluke meter and some of them might even be able to cobble together a cable all on their own, but I digress.
If the next generation of Electrical Engineers cannot figure out how to move past the humble, ubiquitous USB-A port into the bold new future of the USB-C port, then we are all well and truly screwed.