I think this quote distorts the relationship between professional majors and the quality of the universities that offer them.
Some of our country’s most respected universities offer professional majors – and not just engineering. At least two of the Ivy League schools have undergraduate business programs. The University of Pennsylvania has a nursing school. Stanford has undergraduate programs in a variety of career-focused areas, such as Architectural Design and Product Design, as well as many variations on computer science. Northwestern has, among other things, an engineering school, a professional music program, and a major in Radio/Television/Film. Cornell has the majority of its students in professional majors, ranging from landscape architecture to food science to its best-in-the-nation program in hotel administration.
There has long been and will continue to be a tension between the goals of a liberal arts education and the goals of professional education, but the implication that professional majors are inferior programs offered only by inferior schools is just wrong.