That's at the very highest end. As the element size gets larger there are more fabs capable of doing the work. The equipment gets slightly more standardized, etc., although ASML (the Dutch company) is still the big dog in the equipment space.
But even running a small-scale fab spitting out 7400 series chips and 555's is still pretty serious business; you need chemical engineers and material scientists as well as electrical engineers and software engineers (and multidisciplinary versions of those people) to keep things running at all. And nobody can do this stuff out of college -- everyone has extensive apprenticeships and practical experience working in other fabs because so much of the process is knowhow rather than technical specifications.
But even running a small-scale fab spitting out 7400 series chips and 555's is still pretty serious business; you need chemical engineers and material scientists as well as electrical engineers and software engineers (and multidisciplinary versions of those people) to keep things running at all. And nobody can do this stuff out of college -- everyone has extensive apprenticeships and practical experience working in other fabs because so much of the process is knowhow rather than technical specifications.