"Minority of engineering, science majors pursue related careers"

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>Then we should help such labor find gainful employment. For example, I am shocked that more premeds (who are disproportionately bio majors), at least from Berkeley, who can’t get into MD schools don’t seriously consider DO (osteopathy) schools. After all, DO graduates are fully licensed medical practitioners and by law are eligible for every type of residency/internship and medical specialty that the MD graduates are. </p>

<p>More importantly, DO programs seem to have far less competitive admissions processes than MD programs. For example, it doesn’t seem particularly hard to be admitted to the DO program at [Pikeville</a> College School of Osteopathic Medicine](<a href=“http://www.eduers.com/Medical/Kentucky/Pikeville_College_School_of_Osteopathic_Medicine.html]Pikeville”>http://www.eduers.com/Medical/Kentucky/Pikeville_College_School_of_Osteopathic_Medicine.html), whose current class sported a GPA of only 3.3 and a an MCAT of less than 22, which is actually lower than the average MCAT score of 24 of all MCAT test-takers across the nation. Yes, that’s right, you can actually score a significantlyworse-than-average MCA score and still have a chance at a medical career. It also bears mention that the University of Pikeville is a private school and hence should not discriminate against OOS students. And Pikeville is only one such example, for a bevy of DO programs exist, most of which have significantly lower admissions requirements than do MD programs. </p>

<p>But the fact is, premeds, at least from Berkeley, apparently do not seriously consider DO programs. For example, from 2003-2006, not a single graduate from any of the 6 flavors of biology majors at Berkeley (MCB, IB, CB, MEB, MB, GPB) reported attending a DO program. Not even one. On the other hand, many of them reportedly took the low-level, low-paying lab-tech jobs which we decry. Surely some of them could have won admission to one of the DO programs around the nation. But evidently that didn’t happen. Nor did anything change in the latest (2010) graduation cycle: not a single biology graduate reported attending a DO program. </p>

<p><a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Major2006/Major.stm[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Major2006/Major.stm&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/Major.stm[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/Major.stm&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Frankly, I’m baffled as to why not. A DO degree grants you the full legal rights to work as a physician, equivalent to any MD graduate. Granted, perhaps the DO degree is held in lesser renown than an MD degree in some social circles. Nevertheless, that’s surely far better than working as a low-paid lab tech.</p>

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<p>But even if that explanation holds, it doesn’t explain why starting Ibanking packages are so high. To follow your logic, let’s say that clients want to pay hefty fees to banks to manage their money. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that those banks then have to turn around and pay their employees highly. They could simply keep most of those fees for the bank shareholders. </p>

<p>But like I said, that doesn’t seem to happen: the finance industry is notable for shockingly high payouts (as a percentage of revenue) to employees, but middling returns to shareholders. </p>

<p>As a further contrast, consider the fact that consumers are evidently willing to pay high premiums for elegantly engineered Iphones, Ipads, Ipods, and Macs. But Apple doesn’t then turn around and redirect those premiums to pay its engineers at the level of Ibankers. Rather, Apple preserves most of that gusher of revenue as shareholder profits, which has resulted in Apple enjoying some of the highest capital gains of any company in recent history. Heck, Apple apparently has accumulated from retained earnings a roughly equivalent net cash position as the entire market capitalization of major investment banks such as Morgan Stanley. Which makes it all the more remarkable that the average Morgan Stanley Ibanker makes far more than does the average Apple engineer.</p>

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<p>What types of stock options do i-banking employees get? Apple and other companies with stock compensation packages can keep their salaries low by granting stock options, giving performance bonuses in stock, etc. Other tech companies have trouble attracting employees (sometimes) because they can’t (or don’t) pay salaries that are competitive with the base salary + equity package of companies like Apple.</p>

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<p>As a quick note, while I cannot find the original study noted by the OP’s article, the article itself focuses on results for UPenn graduates and specifically notes how Penn’s program encourages non-engineering professions.</p>

<p>In other words, the sky is not falling, that’s just an acorn. The majority of engineers don’t go to Ivy League schools that emphasize liberal arts, and those who do generally have different career aspirations than those who go to actual engineering schools.</p>

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<p>The core problem with a compensation package heavily tilted towards stock options is that now much of your compensation is predicted on components that have nothing to do with your performance as an engineer, but are also a function of your company’s marketing, sales, strategy, and so forth. History is sadly replete with numerous tech firms whose engineering was ingenious but who nevertheless failed because of failings in the company that had nothing to do with the engineering. For example, WordPerfect, at least initially was a far better word processor than MSWord, a contention that even the leadership at Microsoft leadership, yet WordPerfect lost anyway because of poor business strategy. That’s not the fault of the WordPerfect engineers, but their stock options expired worthless anyway.</p>

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<p>Ah, but plenty of engineers do attend engineering programs at MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley, and others which would surely be considered ‘actual’ engineering programs. Nevertheless, many of them choose to abandon engineering for careers in finance or consulting. </p>

<p>Take Ankur Luthra, arguably the most decorated graduate of the Berkeley engineering program of the last generation, having won the Rhodes Scholarship and setting the record for most A+'s ever earned by an engineering undergraduate in school history. He likely could have been a game-changer in the field of engineering. But he never tried at all, having abandoned engineering entirely to work as a fund manager for a private wealth management firm.</p>

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<p>Why don’t you post in the pre-med forum and mention it to all of those high school students posting “I want to major in biology and go to medical school; what college should I go to?”? (Of course, most of them also don’t seem to realize that they need not major in biology to do pre-med.)</p>

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Sure, but what about Michigan, Georgia Tech, Purdue, etc? The number of schools where engineers are poached for the finance industry is very small. The number of those schools that have engineering-oriented engineering programs is even smaller. The number of engineers at those schools who go into the financial industry is relatively large for the schools, but very small over all. </p>

<p>This article (like the rest you post) focuses solely on outcomes and ignores the motivations and intents of those students at the start of their educations, not to mention their actual interests at the time of graduation. Many of those students entered with the specific goal of management or finance. Many more entered engineering without any particular passion, simply aiming for the paycheck. More than a few graduate convinced that engineering is simply not what they want to do with their lives. I know people who fit these descriptions, and I am pretty sure they are well distributed. </p>

<p>You seem to think that losing these people is a crisis for engineering, but I do not think that these people were destined as a whole to make great contributions to engineering - even those that would have stayed in engineering roles would likely have avoided innovative roles, opting instead for things like test or management. Yes, that is an unprovable opinion, but so is any article that looks solely at program outputs without examining the inputs.</p>

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He was a double major in management who had one foot out the door on his first day. He did very well in school - great grades most definitely, but his emphasis was always on the entrepreneurial side with the intent of running a business. I have yet to see a single project he involved himself with that involved actual engineering design.</p>

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<p>I wonder if some of it has to do with the type of people that fill up a company. Do Apple engineers often move up the corporate ladder to become executives more often than entry-level people at investment banks? </p>

<p>I could easily understand someone that’s high ranked at an IB wanting their employees to be paid well, so they can easily justify their own compensation packages. Don’t they all do roughly similar sorts of work? On the other side of things, it’s hard to say that upper management at Apple will be doing anything related to their engineers, so why should their compensation be at all related to what they’re paid?</p>

<p>(This was all a fairly ineloquent way of saying that by giving their subordinates raises, it seems reasonable that people at finance firms could justify their own raises. This seems less likely at more traditional companies where you have lots of very different kinds of employees.)</p>

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<p>Well, it works for Apple, at least now. You brought up Apple in this thread; surely you realize that equity-based compensation is a powerful incentive to work there, for some people.</p>

<p>I could make the argument here that Apple engineering is a core component of the success of the company. Of course, if it was not for clever marketing and promotion, Apple might not be as successful as it is today. But the detail and effort put into their products by their engineers is recognized by those who loyally buy their products.</p>

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<p>If you’re trying to argue here that this is a disincentive to engineering majors’ continuing in engineering careers after graduation, I’d argue that no engineer should assume that just because they create something, there will be a market for it. But if it’s something you really want to see succeed, and you are willing and able to take the risks, give it a try. Apple struggled in its earlier attempts to bring to market the types of products that are now popular. Perseverance matters, sometimes.</p>

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<p>Yet I suspect that finance still pays substantially more than Apple does, even factoring in Apple’s equity-based comp. Particularly going forward. Let’s face it - Apple stock probably isn’t going to dramatically rise anymore anytime soon. Most of Apple’s future success has already been factored into the current stock price. </p>

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<p>What I’m arguing is that, in contrast to engineering, finance offers the opportunity to do a terrible job for a failing company…and still get paid well anyway. You may recall that the employees at AIG Financial Products essentially ruined their company and precipitated an unprecedented government bailout…yet received large bonuses anyway. </p>

<p>Given that, it’s not hard to understand why many people continue to prefer finance over engineering. As an engineer, you reap monetary success only if your company does well, as Apple did. That’s not the case in finance - a financial services firm can perform poorly, and you will still do well. Granted, you won’t do as well as you would during the times when the firm succeeds, but you’ll still do relatively better than almost any other job you could have taken.</p>

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<p>But that only raises more questions. Why was a man as brilliant and dedicated as him already starting out with a ‘foot out the door’ in the first place? Why was he not more interested in engineering design? Heck, even if he was really so interested in the entrepreneurial side of engineering, then why hasn’t he dedicated to life to launching startups? Why does he instead continue to work at a wealth management fund - after all, what does that have to do with technology entrepreneurship? </p>

<p>The upshot is that if engineering was the premiere high-paying, high-status job obtainable right after undergrad - as finance/consulting are today - people would be coming out of the woodwork to be engineers. I suspect that few 18-year-old starting engineering freshmen at MIT or Stanford have the explicit and specific goal to become bankers and consultants (and if they did, they could surely find a more relaxed course of study than engineering). Yet finance and consulting is precisely where a significant chunk of them will be found 4 years later.</p>

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<p>Actually, they wouldn’t, or at least, they shouldn’t, as higher level employees are (or at least should be) judged (partially) on the profitability of the teams they run. Hence, restricting the pay of your underlings should redound to your benefit as that improves your team’s profits. </p>

<p>But note that I said ‘should happen’, and I readily agree that it may not actually happen. But that’s then all the more reason to, lamentably, prefer a career in finance over engineering. After all, who doesn’t want a job where the bosses are incentivized to pay you as much as they can? Surely we all want that.</p>

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<p>Many of them will work as engineers for a few years…only to then turn around and head to elite MBA programs with the express purpose of becoming bankers or consultants. For example, right now as we speak, there are 15-20 MBA students at Harvard Business School who were former engineering students at Georgia Tech. I suspect that at best only a handful of them will become engineering managers once they finish. </p>

<p>I personally don’t find much difference between an engineering graduate who never works as an engineer at all vs. one who only works as an engineer for a few years at the entry-level before leaving. </p>

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<p>That’s a rather provocative claim, don’t you think? After all, finance and consulting don’t poach randomly from the engineering students talent pool, and if they did, then I would probably agree with you that there may be no problem. No, those firms are poaching from (presumably) the very best of the talent pool; namely those who attend elite engineering programs at MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Berkeley, and the like - and not only that, but they tend to poach those who attained strong grades at those schools. The guy with straight C’s at MIT is not exactly a strong finance/consulting candidate.</p>

<p>Therefore, if what you’re saying is true, then that implies that attending a top-ranked engineering program such as MIT and attaining strong grades there is actually negatively correlated with future engineering innovativeness. {Note, I am not asserting causation, as a mere correlational story suffices.} Really? </p>

<p>If that’s the case, then perhaps MIT needs to desperately revamp its admissions policy, as apparently MIT is admitting a disproportionate number of people (relative to, say, Georgia Tech) who aren’t actually going to be highly innovative in engineering, and may not even care about engineering in the first place. Either that, or perhaps MIT (and surely Stanford as well) deserves to lose its status as arguably the world’s premier engineering school. After all, one of MIT’s purported missions is to produce the world’s next generation of technology innovators. What you’re effectively saying is that MIT has abdicated that mission. </p>

<p>Furthermore, there’s also little value in having MIT engineering students strive to achieve high grades. After all, if the high grades (which the finance/consulting industries find so attractive) are not positively correlated with future engineering creativeness anyway, then there is little reason for students who actually want to work as engineers to achieve high grades.</p>

<p>This issue because salient because engineering employers are sorely misinformed. For example, I suspect that if you polled a random sample of engineering recruiters and gave them a choice of 2 schools - MIT or Georgia Tech - and asked which school produced more innovative engineering graduates, the majority would likely pick the former. {It wouldn’t be 100%, but the correlation would be clear.} Similarly, if you asked which graduate is more likely to be more creative - the guy with straight A’s or the guy with terrible grades - again, they would likely pick the former. But apparently most recruiters would be sadly mistaken, as the guy with strong grades from MIT - who is precisely the desirable hire for the finance/consulting industry - is actually less innovative than the guy with terrible grades at Georgia Tech. </p>

<p>Again to be clear, as I am not asserting any story of causation, it doesn’t matter why the recruiters are mistaken. All that matters is that they are mistaken. For example, perhaps it is indeed the case that having strong grades at MIT is actually highly correlated with a personal lack of interest in engineering and a greater interest in finance. But that doesn’t matter, because that personal predilection is unobservable to the recruiter. All that the recruiter can see is that somebody is from MIT with high grades. If those recruiters continue to prefer engineers who actually are not interested in engineering, then those recruiters are clearly mistaken, and the world should stop viewing MIT as a leading generator of prime engineering talent.</p>

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<p>Here’s perhaps the clearest way to examine the outputs from the inputs of the engineering pipeline: consider the graduates of engineering PhD programs from MIT. It seems most difficult to argue that those who can complete a PhD in engineering from any decent school, let alone at MIT, are somehow unpassionate about engineering, were actually secretly interested in finance/business, or could not have made important innovations in engineering. Let’s face it - if you don’t actually care about engineering, you’re not going to finish the PhD. You might be able to complete a consolation master’s, although even that’s debatable - and that consolation master’s is sufficient if all you wanted was a career in finance or consulting. But the PhD requires passion possessed only by those who truly care about their topic, for only that’s going to motivate you only those lonely nights when your research is not going well (which always happens). And to complete that PhD at a school such as MIT clearly means that you’re a highly talented engineer. </p>

<p>Yet the fact is, a large percentage of MIT eng PhD graduates take jobs in finance or consulting. For example, in 2008, the employers who hired chemical engineering PhD graduates included Deloitte, Goldman and McKinsey - employers who seem far removed from chemical engineering. That’s a precipitous loss from the engineering talent pool. </p>

<p>What if they had actually stayed in engineering? Perhaps we’d now have a cellphone battery that lasts for months at a time. Maybe we could have solved the world’s energy crisis by developing a biofuel that doesn’t consume extant farmland. Or perhaps we could cheaply combat global climate change by devising a method to sequester carbon from the atmosphere. We’ll never know because those brilliant engineers are devoting their talents to other tasks.</p>

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<p>Oh maybe I know the answer to this. In the 1960’s NASA’s budget was 5% of the federal budget. Now it is 0.25% of the federal budget.<br>
My other theory is that engineers sit too far away from the money stream. Why do sales people get paid so well? Because they know how much the profit margin is and they demand their cut. Why does finance get paid so well, because they touch the money and they demnd their cut. Why do engineers get better than somebody with a BA in English but not as much as they are worth? Because they are too far away from the money stream to say, “I will take my rolodex and my clients with me - Good Bye!”</p>

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<p>So how about this proposal. Instead of a bailout to the finance industry consisting of $800 billion in direct funding from the US Treasury and indirect Federal Reserve emergency liquidity facilities that were surely worth hundreds of billions more, let’s take all of that money and instead devote it to science and engineering funding programs such as NASA, the NSF, and the NIH.</p>

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<p>Perhaps the best engineers are leaving engineering because finance is more challenging? Does anybody have any direct experience regarding what these people do when they leave engineering? Maybe they’re writing highly sophisticated software to manage accounts. Maybe they’re developing intricate mathematical models far more detailed than what they’d expect to see in a comparable engineering role.</p>

<p>What I’m really getting at is this: perhaps the reason that passionate, excellent engineers are going to finance is that the finance industry provides a richer arena for top performers to perform. Said another way, perhaps finance work is genuinely interesting to many highly competent engineering graduates, and the best graduates simply have their choice of job. I come from a mathematics background academically and work in software, and frankly, I think working in finance could be very interesting. Why the dichotomy between engineering and finance? Why the implicit assumption that engineers are going to finance only for the money?</p>

<p>If smart engineering grads weren’t better at finance than smart philosophy grads, why would the financial industry be hiring so many? Or are they hiring all the philosophers, too?</p>

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<p>Well, all I can say is that while I’ve heard the finance industry described by many adjectives, “challenging” isn’t one of them. The stereotypical finance job, at least at the entry-level, is repeatedly entering numbers into spreadsheets that you didn’t even build yourself, and then creating Powerpoints and pitchbooks based on those numbers. That doesn’t seem particularly challenging to me, and indeed, finance insiders regularly concede that what they do isn’t rocket science. </p>

<p>But to your point, if what you are saying is true, then that only raises the question: why can’t engineering jobs be made more interesting? </p>

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<p>They are also hiring the philosophers. And the English majors. And the art history majors. But only as long as they come from elite branded schools such as Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Princeton and the like. </p>

<p>But it’s engineering (and the other majors of STEM) that I worry about. Not to be overly controversial, but it doesn’t seem to me that art history grads really produce much value for society anyway, so if they are shunted to finance and consulting, that’s no loss to the world. {To be clear, while I agree that artists create substantial value to the world by enriching our cultural milieu, it’s not clear to me what art history graduates provide.} But the loss of STEM graduates, and especially the loss of our best STEM graduates, is unnerving.</p>