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<p>It isn’t just you. Lightblade just sounds like he is guessing based on what he has heard thirdhand or something.</p>
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<p>The fact is, there is nothing wrong with going to work right after your bachelor’s degree, and for most people that is the best option. However, there are many, many jobs that require a master’s degree or higher. For many of these jobs, to get the equivalent experience just working in industry you would have to take many years to do it if you could ever do it at all.</p>
<p>Just to expand on how you won’t learn everything at work, most engineers at large companies are not the innovators. They are applying a semi-standard set of tools to solve problems with some of the fundamentals taken into account with a heck of a lot of empirical techniques thrown in for efficiency. In an environment like that, how is someone supposed to delve deeper into the underlying physics of a given problem if they wanted to do so? True, many people don’t, and they are the ones who should be getting jobs after their bachelor’s degree, but there are a few who want to go deeper, and especially at the Ph.D. level, you often just can’t get that kind of depth from working in industry.</p>
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<p>Many if not most engineering graduate students get their education paid for by performing research and/or teaching. At the very least, most graduate students are breaking even during graduate school and starting out with a master’s at $10k to $20k higher than their bachelor’s counterparts. You make the lost money up pretty quick assuming you are a competent employee.</p>
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<p>There are so many more reasons to go to graduate school other than just not finding a job. In fact, that has to be one of the most terrible reasons in the first place. Full-time graduate school is something you really ought to be interested in, not settling for, otherwise your experience will be terrible.</p>