Unfortunately, the push is coming from within academia, not industry. And it has little to do with content and even less to do with quality. It is more about cash-strapped schools looking toward marketing gimmicks and a Happy Meal approach to education.
There are some very good programs out there. Mid-FL tech may be one of them. Just don't take the admissions and recruiting team's word for it.
Talk to graduates. Find out how many can even sharpen a drill. Talk to employers. Ask if they would hire graduates from a particular school. Increasingly, the answer in both cases is no.
I don't entirely agree with this. Certainly, schools are broke and looking for ways to increase enrollments. But in my area at least, there is a preponderance of shops seeking degreed machinists versus experienced machinists and some prefer certain schools over others. Some schools get a bad reputation because if you pay them enough and show up, they'll give you a degree. Employers know this and realize that your degree doesn't mean you know what you're doing. Then again, if you go to a school like mine, local employers recognize it as a school that produces quality machinists, not button pushers.
In Minnesota here, the state heavily invests in colleges including the 2 year tech school I go to. We have a truly excellent machining program, starting from fundamentals, theory and manual machining(including drill sharpening on a bench grinder
) all the way up to CNC programming, fixturing, lean, SPC, shop management, etc. I'll be $20k in debt when I'm done, but I haven't even graduated yet and I already have an excellent full time job.
I agree with the general sentiment about Florida though. Getting a really good machining education there will probably be difficult or expensive. Come august, my degree will cost me about $18k. For that much money, I could have picked up a small Kitamura VMC with enough money left over for copious amounts of used/cheap tooling, stock and books. If moving near a good tech school isn't an option, this might be. I'll tell you beforehand though. No amount of books can replace hands-on experience.
An operator job("button pusher") will expose you to some really neat fixturing ideas, machining and inspection methodology, CNC machine operation fundamentals, etc. You can get theory from a book, but theory doesn't make chips; experience does.