I can testify that this (systematically alternating between school and work throughout your undergraduate studies) makes you a better engineer. I learned about it when I moved to Germany, and it shows in some of my colleagues who chose to do it.

This is not an option in a lot of countries, including my own (Morocco). The closest thing to this system that I did was to convince my computer science department to let me take a long pause from school (January to September) and move to Brazil where I found a good tech company that paid me for my ridiculously long internship. I came back with a very clear idea of my strengths and weaknesses when working on large and critical software systems, and I designed my last semester around these new insights.

Granted, most people achieve similar goals through traditional internships routes, but it helps to be able to see you work live on beyond summer and be able to identify medium term regressions, follow on on other use cases, and account for the fact that other people will be taking up the torch soon.