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My thoughts as a student, having participated on my team for 4 years, (although now I've graduated and am now referred to as a "mentor") are this: There should be a balance between engineers and students, and between design and fabrication.
On my team, students come up with the ideas for what the robot will do, e.g. what it's functions are, what it's strategy will be, etc. Unfortunately, most high school students lack the engineering experience to design the specifics on how a certain mechanism will perform it's task. Our engineers sort of mentally prod students into spitting out ideas on how to create something, then the engineer will come up with the specific design, print it out with dimensions, explain to the student exactly how it works, then let the student fabricate and implement the part.
This is the situation for most of the complex mechanisms in our robot, and most of the simpler tasks (e.g. idlers) are designed and manufactured by seasoned students who have the experience of previous years. As a result, the bulk of the complex design work is done by engineers, while the majority of the fabrication is done by students.
I'd write and explain more, but at present I've the biggest headache I've had in a long long while, so I'll forego the explanation of why this is more beneficial to students than having engineers build the entire robot, and simply explain what they are doing.
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