Is harvard engineering (Biomedical especially) famous?

sakky
Mon, 24 Oct 2005 04:35:53 +0000

You must understand that many students with engineering majors don’t directly run off to wall-street (even from elite schools). They work in industry for several years before getting their MBA and finally transition into a specific sector consulting / banking that deals with a familiar area that they worked in. I didn’t realize this till I attended a networking meeting at Cooper Union for alumni currently working in wall-street. For such a small school, we had a surprisingly large amount of bankers/consultants. Most of them were associates/analysts but we had a few managing directors and even a CEO working for some of the most powerful i-banks.



I understand this very well, but it still begs the question of ‘why’? Why are all these clearly highly technically skilled people with top engineering degrees transitioning their way out of engineering, whether it’s right out of undergrad, or whether it’s after B-school? Why? Why can’t engineering keep this high-quality talent? Why does this talent drift away and why doesn’t engineering do something to prevent it? That’s the real question at hand.



Note that the education establishment has a strong vested interest in producing lots of engineers – paying these engineers well afterwards and making that education worth their time and toil are really “not my department” for the education establishment.



I don’t entirely agree with your first phrase. The US educational establishment certainly doesn’t produce a lot of engineers at all. Consider this. Less than 5% of all bachelor’s degrees granted in the US were engineering degrees, compared to 46% (yeah, that’s right 46%!) of all bachelor’s degrees in China.

Also consider this quote: “In the US, more students are getting degrees in “parks and recreation” than in electrical engineering”

http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/press/company/2003/c03033.shtml

The point is that the US educational establishment really does not produce many engineering degrees at all, relative to the huge number of other degrees that are produced. 65k new engineering bachelor’s is truly a drop in the bucket compared to about 1.3 million new bachelor’s degrees of all types produced in the US every year.

However, my point is that even of the relatively small number of US engineering degrees produced every year, some of them, especially the top ones, will run off to other careers. They could get engineering jobs. Instead they choose something else. Hence, US engineering companies can’t even attract all the 65k of engineers that are produced every year.

However, my real beef is not that these companies should try to hire all these engineers. If they don’t want to, then fine. Like you said, the US may not need to have lots of engineers in order to maintain its technological prominence. However, what annoys the heck out of me is when US companies SAY that they want more engineers, but then don’t actually do anything to make engineering jobs more attractive.