I did a master's in econometrics and that was my experience. In the last year of my undergrad, I took a course in machine learning that seemed to have way more intellectual rigor than any of the material covered in grad school.

At one point, I mentioned to the professor that I was concerned that the model he had presented was overfitting, and he had no understanding of what the term meant. I think that economics studies fascinating problems (how do people make choices? What are the optimal choices for policy makers to make?) but economists approach the problem completely wrong.