The fact that he was brilliant and dedicated does not mean that he had to be dedicated to engineering, or that he had to have a passion in engineering design. I think it quite probable that he always had a primary interest in the business side of things, and thought (when he was a younger student) that engineering entrepreneurship was the best route to his own business, or perhaps that engineering would be a fallback for him. When he graduated, he realized that he did not need or want to do engineering in order to accomplish his actual goals. Or perhaps his course of study simply clarified where his passions truly lay.</p>
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I think a surprising number of them at least consider that option, even if they do not consider it their primary goal as freshmen. The job you take after graduation is a result of many different factors, only one of which is money, and many more of which I have already mentioned.</p>
Perhaps, but who’s to say that’s what they have the best engineers doing? Or the best humanities grads? Who’s to say that the best engineering grads are even getting the same kinds of jobs as the best humanities grads? Finance is clearly a mathematical subject; maybe the best engineering grads are the ones making the spreadsheets, and the best humanities grads are the ones developing effective pitchbook-composition strategies? The fact is that small changes to one constant in one spreadsheet can mean a lot of money - maybe finance firms can’t afford to get it wrong (I think we all have some understanding of what happens when they do)?</p>
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I’m not necessarily trying to say that anything is true, per se; just raising an alternative hypothesis for why engineers are leaving. It doesn’t seem to me that only monetary compensation can be at play - especially for the best of the best (which seems to be the assumption, as well). That being said, if the average grad going into engineering is less skilled (the most skilled ones are going to finance, after all), maybe the work is less exciting because the engineers don’t want the challenge and the management doesn’t believe they can trust employees with high-level work (maybe rightly so!). More succinctly, maybe it’s a vicious cycle: the best engineers go to finance, so engineering is left with lots of employees who don’t want hard/complicated/unsupervised/whatever work.</p>
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I don’t find this particularly controversial - maybe just a tad naive. How many engineers do you think make a difference? Maybe I’m the naive one, but if you look at the world’s top-10 engineers and the world’s top-10 art historians, I don’t know whether you’d see a lot of a difference in terms of contribution to society. Note that you might be predisposed to value one kind of contribution more than another, but for every one of you - I think, anyway, this might be realistic - there might be 10 others who honestly think the art historian’s left more of a mark on society.</p>
I agree that they are poaching the “best”, but I disagree that the best candidates for finance and consulting are the same as the best candidates for design engineering - while a certain amount of scholarship and discipline is needed regardless, there are a number of characteristics and skills that are unique to each path. I think it quite likely that many of those “best” engineering grads “poached” from engineering would likely have either exited from or struggled in a design engineering role.</p>
<p>I also think a straight-C MIT grad is not a strong engineering candidate, either. I also think that many graduates of top business and law programs deliberately choose to eschew the high-money jobs to which they would have relatively easy access, instead choosing to work at non-profits or even out of those sectors entirely - money isn’t everything!</p>
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No, I am saying that there is a positive correlation, and that grades may well be the single best indicator, but that grades are certainly not the ONLY indicator and when taken as a whole are not a sufficient predictor of success. If it was, why even interview? Just make offers based on GPA!</p>
<p>Incidentally, I think that the correlation between engineering success and GPA probably does become negative after 3.5 or so - people with that broad level of success (since they also had to do well in English, history, and gym classes, for example) are demonstrating more of an ability to succeed in school than a specific ability to succeed in engineering. They are also likely to have the kind of expectations that will drive them to seek prestige wherever it lies, either in management, finance, law, etc.</p>
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I think that MIT is equally happy, so long as the graduates are employed, well-paid, and happy. If they are failing to place some students at all then I think they might examine this issue. Otherwise, why should they be expected to dictate what field graduates should enter?</p>
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If that is all the recruiter sees, they should consider a different job, but consider that a large number of students graduate in fields slightly or substantially different than the field in which they graduate. A college recruiter’s primary interest is identifying students who will complete a program of study, knowing full well that the actual program may change. A student who enters with an interest in engineering and graduates is a success, regardless of the correlation between the words on the diploma and the title on their office or cubicle.</p>
The fact that they could have made innovations in engineering does not mean that engineering is their best option at the time of graduation. Academia has a number of problems as a career, and many new engineering PhD’s don’t want that mess. Industry has many problems as well, especially for a hyper-specialized PhD who might struggle mightily to find a company looking for someone interested in his essentially unmarketable thesis topic. Many will find that they are marketable largely because they (gasp) are a PhD from a big name school, and that having them on the right forms and presentations will help to sell products (you know, that thing the financial sector wants them for).</p>
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Perhaps they would have built a shack in their back yards and mailed bombs to people. Maybe we would now have a more realistic novelty fake dog poo. Maybe (and most likely) any fallout from not having these people would be so small that in most fields it would not even be noticed. I love speculation.</p>
<p>Which seems to only further bolster my point: that plenty of people who are clearly passionate about engineering choose to leave anyway because of the relatively weak career opportunities in engineering. We should therefore improve those career opportunities. </p>
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<p>Well, as opposed to creating financial bombs that crashed the world’s economy…which is clearly not a matter of speculation, because that actually happened. </p>
<p>Regarding the example of moving to a rural shack and mailing bombs to people, again, I think that only speaks to my point: that may indeed be what happens when brilliant people (in this case, a mathematician), actually leaves his field. As far as anybody knows, he wasn’t building bombs when he was actually working in academia. Only when people leave do they seem to build bombs, literal or financial. </p>
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<p>Well, apparently whatever jobs they could find wasn’t interesting enough to all those MIT PhD’s who left. Maybe we need to develop more jobs like yours for them?</p>
<p>Oh really? We can probably name at least ten 10 engineers (or the equivalent tinkerers/inventors before engineering was a formal degree program) in world history. How many art historians can you name? {Again, I’m not talking about artists which I agree do create substantial value through their cultural contributions. I’m talking about art historians.} Heck, how many people can even name a single art historian?</p>
<p>Nobody is dictating that any graduates should be forced to head anywhere. On the other hand, there is a branding and positioning problem when a school that inheres much of its reputation as a top engineering school does not actually seem to place a high percentage of its engineering graduates into actual engineering careers, relative to peer schools. For example, it is almost certainly true that many lower-ranked engineering programs actually place a higher percentage of its eng graduates into actual engineering careers than does MIT. One would logically expect the reverse. </p>
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<p>And so it seems that you’re now agreeing with me, that recruiters should therefore no longer view MIT as a prime engineering recruiting target, as a disproportionate percentage of MIT’s engineering graduates will not actually become engineers. </p>
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<p>Is he a success? Sure, he’s a success relative to those who don’t graduate at all. But the purpose of a (supposedly) top-ranked engineering program, I thought, was to produce a high percentage of graduates who are actually interested in engineering, is it not? If not, then what is its purpose? Like I said, students, even those at MIT, who want to pursue other careers could surely choose a far less exacting degree path (i.e. Sloan management).</p>
<p>Whoever said anything about ‘design’ engineering? I’m talking about any kind of engineering. </p>
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<p>Sure, and if engineering was a more desirable career path - either because it paid better or because of improvement in the other factors you mentioned - then surely plenty more people who considered engineering would actually then pursue it.</p>
<p>Well, sad to say, but those sort of rote, albeit high-paying, finance jobs are precisely what new engineering and humanities graduates are being hired to do at the analyst level. All analysts are pooled into the same job category with little differentiation, and the fact is, few if any analysts have the power to make any changes to the spreadsheets that they use or are actually involved at the pitchbook strategy development level in any meaningful way. Their job is simply to execute orders, and be paid well to do it.</p>
<p>Fair enough, then you’re agreeing with me that recruiters should not care about research-excellence-oriented rankings either, right? </p>
<p>But like I said, I suspect that if you were to poll a random group of engineering recruiters about where they think the best engineering undergraduate hires are to be found, many of them are surely going to respond: MIT. So these recruiters are then tragically mistaken, are they not? After all, if research rankings are not actually correlated with the best possible hires (which itself should presumably be correlated with ‘undergraduate interest’), then why do the recruiters seem to think that they are?</p>
<p>I can agree that social prestige is also at play: many MIT (and Stanford) engineering students prefer not to take engineering jobs seen as low-status. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, I think it’s a rather difficult intellectual case to make that money has nothing to do with the migration of talent from engineering to finance. For example, it was only merely coincidental that during the last generation when the gap between finance and engineering wages grew was also precisely the same time when more engineering students chose to leave engineering for finance. That seems implausible. </p>
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<p>Nobody has said that it is the only indicator. But you agree with me that it is the single best indicator, which means that finance, who tends to poach high-GPA engineers, must then indeed be drawing from a highly disproportionately innovative class of engineering students. </p>
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<p>That’s an incendiary assertion, and if true, then more recruiters should be informed of its veracity. I can think of several (admittedly elite) engineering firms who won’t interview anybody with a GPA below 3.3 or 3.5/4, which tends to indicate that they are actually eliminating the best possible candidates. More importantly, it also means that engineering students should deliberately sabotage their own GPA’s once they start rising above a 3.5, for they should want to avoid being seen as having overly ambitious expectations. </p>
<p>Yet even that presents an interesting conundrum. Even if it was true that somebody with a 3.5+ GPA has high expectations, why can’t engineering firms improve their careers to satisfy those high expectations? Why are finance and consulting firms seemingly able to meet those high expectations, but not engineering firms?</p>
Art history isn’t really my thing; I, as I imagine you do, fall into the category of people who tend to value technical and engineering contributions very highly. That’s what we’re interested in, primarily. It wouldn’t be fair for me to defend art history.</p>
<p>That being said, we can check Wikipedia and see how many “art historians” I recognize.</p>
<p>I’ve certainly heard of Pliny the Elder, albeit in a different context. He recorded some of the earliest proto-art-history. Giorgio Vasari seems to have been fairly influential, and wrote the first true “history” of art. Winckelmann introduced art criticism; his work influenced Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. Kant and Hegel also wrote about aesthetics at around that time. Woelfflin is the father of modern art history. The list goes on.</p>
<p>A few further observations: “art history” is fairly narrow compared to “engineering”… a fairer comparison might be between history and engineering, or between art historians and civil engineers, etc.; art history informs many of the artists who, according to you, “do create substantial value through their cultural contributions”… I find it indefensible to suppose that the sophistication of contemporary art would have been at all possible without the detailed history and analysis performed by art historians.</p>
<p>And we’re just talking about art historians. Let’s not forget that your real argument is being leveled at all the groups who, according to you, don’t produce value. I think it’s safe to say that your average, educated person will be much more familiar with other professions’ superstars (sports, entertainment, politics, etc.) than with engineering’s top historical lineup. Philosophy (even of the non-analytical kind) probably stacks up pretty well, too.</p>
<p>Not to mention that recognition from society at large isn’t the best determinant of what is constituting real value. For instance, how many people do you think would know the answer to these questions from memory?</p>
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<li>Who discovered penicillin?</li>
<li>Who is credited with creating the first map (in the West)?</li>
<li>Who invented the transistor?</li>
<li>Who defeated the Ottoman Empire at the battle of Vienna?</li>
<li>Who wrote the first English grammar?</li>
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<p>I think you’d be hard pressed to say that these contributions weren’t incredibly important, but I’d wager that a random sampling of educated people would show an average score of less than 1/5… probably much less. Sometimes, people fade into the background.</p>
I hesitate to even ask, but do you have any proof of this? A source? Evidence? I don’t even know where you’d get generalizable information on that; it’s not a fair request. I suppose you could always find some sort of ethnographic or statistical study… do you know of any? Care to share?</p>
<p>I think you only proved my point…you had to check Wikipedia. You couldn’t name any off the top of your head. </p>
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<p>Fair enough, then name me some important art history developments (without checking wikipedia), regardless of whether you knew who developed them?</p>
Personally, I think we need to do a better job educating PhD applicants and candidates about the marketability of their degree based on their research areas. A great many PhD applicants study areas with minimum interest in industry, either out of a belief that they will go on to academia or because it seemed the best PhD offer they got. Having completed their dissertation on the methods bacteria use to find food (one of my offers), and having seen that there is no interest in someone with that hyper-specialization… why should I get upset if they leave engineering? At that point, the damage has already been done.</p>
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Well, if we asked economists to design bridges, would we be surprised when they fell apart?</p>
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That part was a joke. The main point of my argument was that the number of genuinely innovative engineers is extremely small, even among the graduates of elite programs, so the poaching which you fear is likely having a very small impact on actual innovation. A far larger issue are those that discourage practicing engineers from making the effort to innovate.</p>
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