Was there such a pipeline in any country where a fab was built? Or did clever people just apply to the company and get trained on the job? This is not a new problem for the US or any other country. IMO people don't study manufacturing-adjacent stuff as much in the US because there is little manufacturing going on here.
My school had a 1(?) micron fab for EE student projects (among other things), at a time when that wasn't decades behind the bleeding edge. It may have been a few years behind.
