My guess is that this never actually happened.
I can't imagine anyone actually going through the trouble of doing this as a project, and I especially can't imagine a college professor requiring a student to meet with a counselor for failing a project.
I think it's entirely possible that they chose to compare to a 3 year old phone not because they are only targeting those upgrades to people with 3 years old phones, but because it sounds a lot more impressive that way instead of just the smaller incremental improvements over last years model.
It should also be noted that Apple admitted at one point to purposefully slowing down older iPhones too, which very clearly was done to get people to upgrade. If that's not planned obsolescence I don't know what is.
You talk about them as if they are some benevolent entity, when that's just very much not the case.