That's the traditional way of setting up classes, but it's not the rational way. We like people we cooperate with, even when the initial relationships are negative. Put a prejudiced white in with a black student, and after working together cooperatively a positive relationship tends to develop. Engineering employers are looking for new hires who possess teamwork and other interpersonal skills. It sounds like cooperative learning would bring out those very skills.
Students have higher selfesteem, more of the time, when they're working together cooperatively.
If employers want engineers to be constructive, functioning parts of the team, then we almost have to say that engineers need to be trained that way. It's not something that they pick up magically on their own. If we have a highly competitive, intense program that puts engineering students at each other's throats all through school, when these students enter the workforce, they're going to act in a highly competitive way and be at each other's throats. But the research shows that the more complex the material, the more technical the material, the harder the material is to understand . . . Now, of course, all these statements are statistical predictions.