as time goes by, the body of knowledge just gets so big, and a new grad may be expected to know so much more than decades ago that just to cover the entry level material could take 5 years I suppose.)
Exactly the opposite.
In all Universities the syllabus has been cut back and cut back because students are arriving knowing less and less and you have to spend longer getting them to a level they were 20 to 30 years ago. This is especially true of Maths which you need for Science and engineering.