Do you have any evidence that MIT’s reputation has taken any significant hit? And any reason to “logically expect the reverse” when the influence of name-recognition has long been understood?</p>
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I was referring to recruiters who work for MIT to recruit high school students. I think recruiters SHOULD still recruit from MIT, I just do not think they should hold those graduates in the same kind of reverence that you do. MIT (I think) produces generally superior engineers… but I would take 5 typical graduates of top-20 programs over 4 graduates of top-5 programs, dollar for dollar.</p>
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Is he/she a success? Yes! The job of the school is to produce happy, employed graduates. If they have done so, they have succeeded. The job of the student is to educate themselves and obtain a career that hits a good balance of income and satisfaction. If they have done so, they have succeeded! If an MIT undergrad realizes part way through that they would rather be an art historian at a quarter the lifetime earnings of an engineer… good for them!</p>
We were discussing innovation. How much innovation in engineering occurs outside design? There are many valuable non-design engineering roles, but the farther you get from design the less it becomes about innovation and the more it becomes about damage control.</p>
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Pursue it, yes. Contribute to it in a meaningful manner? Probably not. People who come in for the money will always chase the money. As soon as someone offers them management, or law, or business, they are out the door. How then do they contribute? Or do you have some secret plan to ensure that engineering will ALWAYS be the most lucrative field?</p>
You conveniently ignore my point that we’re in the “science / engineering” crowd, not the “art / history” crowd, and I’m therefore ill-prepared to argue on art history’s behalf. I haven’t proven any point of yours; just accepted a limitation in my preparation. After all, having two blind people argue whether music sounds better than art looks isn’t very fair to the guy defending the possibility that painting is an equally valid form of artistic expression!</p>
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Having already looked at the Wikipedia page, this isn’t very fair, either. However, I think you’re quite missing the point of history, in general; if anything, historians only “develop” new ways of thinking about or interpreting society and what society does. These ways of thinking and interpreting are inherently valuable. If nothing else, the recording of what has gone before has been one of the greatest advances of our entire species, and if you value the contributions made by artists, then ignoring the role art historians have played is indefensible.</p>
<p>No comments on the other portions of my post?</p>
Single best indicator, but a close second is passion, and my belief is that those poached into finance score very low on other important predictors of innovation… including passion. High GPA is important, just like speed is to an NFL cornerback, but if that is ALL you have going for you then engineering is not a good match (especially if you want to be innovative). Or do you think Olympic sprinters just eschew the highly-lucrative NFL out of snottiness?</p>
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Those engineering companies are doing fine, as they themselves have uses for 3.5+ GPA engineers in non engineering roles - sales, management, etc. Likewise, well-rounded engineers have all the options of lower-GPA engineers… which means that those who stay can still do well, while those who migrate into related fields can do well at the expense of engineering.</p>
<p>Sure, why you could simply travel to the business school section of CC and search around and find posts of former analysts talking about their old jobs. Rare indeed will you find anybody who actually had the job responsibilities that you cited. </p>
<p>But my analysis is not based on that. It is based on *actual former analysts that I know<a href=“of%20which%20I%20know%20many”>/i</a>. For all of them, the job was indeed rote, regardless of their undergraduate backgrounds. I find it implausible to believe that they are wildly unrepresentative. </p>
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<p>Actually, I find that notion to be deeply implausible, for the simple notion that most artists are not highly educated in art history. That is to say, while they obviously understand the practice of art well, and surely also understand the works of past and present artists that who have influenced them, that’s a deeply far cry from having to understand the art history theory that is the ultimate output of art historians.</p>
<p>Again, nobody has ever once argued that GPA was the sole factor. But as long as it is a leading indicator - indeed the best indicator as we have agreed - then the fact that finance (and consulting) tend to key upon that indicator must mean that they are indeed drawing from a highly disproportionate group of innovative engineering students. </p>
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<p>Uh, no, I said that some don’t interview any engineers with less than a 3.5 GPA. Yet they still have new engineers working in actual engineering jobs, not just in non-engineering roles, meaning that these new engineers must have 3.5+ GPA’s. So are you saying that these firms must not be innovative? </p>
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<p>Then let’s go ask some actual practicing artists how many actual art historians that they know. Indeed, I know a couple of artists and I’ll ask them when I see them. </p>
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<p>Are they? I believe we’re rapidly leaving the realm of engineering, but I would ask the following: exactly how many true, useful, and non-obvious insights do we have today that we would not have were it not for the work of art historians? Again, to be clear, I’m not talking about the work of artists, I’m talking about art historians. </p>
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<p>But that’s the point: it hasn’t taken a hit, but perhaps it should. After all, a top-ranked engineering school is logically expected to produce more engineers than the middling-ranked engineering schools is it not? Otherwise, why is it more highly ranked than the middling schools? </p>
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<p>My opinions are irrelevant, what matters are the opinions of employment recruiters, and like I said (and apparently you seem to agree) that they continue to view MIT highly. Perhaps they shouldn’t. </p>
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<p>No, bad for them, because those students have taken spots that could have gone to people who are actually going to work as engineers. MIT, as I’m sure we would agree, rejects plenty of students who would have succeeded at the school, yet were rejected and hence presumably relegated to lesser engineering programs. Simply from a matching efficiency standpoint, it is suboptimal for MIT to be spending its vast engineering resources upon students who are not actually going to become engineers, particularly when there were other students that they could have admitted that actually wanted to utilize those same engineering resources. </p>
<p>Again, this is most clear within the PhD programs. MIT provides arguably the best eng PhD training in the world, yet offers but a tiny handful of slots. Speaking from a pure efficiency standpoint, those slots should go to people who are actually going to work as engineers. </p>
<p>The same holds true with the recruitment phase. Recruiters expect to go to MIT to find top recruitment talent - that is to say, students who are actually interested in engineering jobs. After all, that is what the supposedly vaunted reputation of MIT would suggest, is it not? But if that’s not the case, then recruiters are inefficiently spending resources at MIT only to find students who are not actually interested.</p>
<p>Then along those lines, I think we need to reduce the overall marketability and attractiveness of finance, as the dangers of that field for society have been demonstrated in excruciatingly vivid detail over the last few years. </p>
<p>But to your point, I think you’ve raised a different topic entirely: that being highly ranked engineering schools (such as MIT ) may not be producing useful and practical PhD graduates. Yet another reason why perhaps recruiters should stop viewing MIT with such reverence. But they won’t stop. </p>
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<p>So is the implication for society that engineers should be incentivized to actually stay in engineering? </p>
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<p>Actually, your interpretation suggests the opposite. If you are correct, and the number of truly innovative engineers in the world is small, then the loss of even a few such people is a tragedy. For example, if there are truly only 10 top-notch innovative engineers in the world, then the loss of even 1 of them to finance represents a loss of a whopping 10% of the world’s top-level innovation.</p>
<p>Then I’ll give you an example. Larry Ellison has freely admitted in one of his biographies that he founded Oracle with the express intent of becoming rich. Yet Oracle has undeniably been one of the pillars of innovation in corporate IT/software in the last generation. </p>
<p>The same can be said for most tech startups - the truth is, the opportunity to become rich is a key factor in having people found and join tech startups. Let’s be honest: most engineers are not going to suffer through the Ramen-noodle-eating phase of a startup if they thought they had zero chance of becoming rich. Yet the fact is, startups are where the bulk of innovation has occurred in the US tech industry over the last few decades. </p>
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<p>Well, I don’t have a ‘secret plan’, or indeed, any plan at all: I actually thought that this discussion board would be a prime place to develop one.</p>
<p>But you don’t really seem to be all that interested in having engineering become a more lucrative profession - a notion to which I find shocking. I think we’re all engineers here. You guys aren’t interesting in having more money? {Heck, if that’s true that you guys don’t really want more money, then fine, if you ever get a raise, feel free to send the extra money to me.}</p>
<p>Sure, I agree, innovation is difficult to measure.</p>
<p>But I don’t think we need to devise a method of measuring it. I think we can all agree that *some[/i engineers in the world must be more innovative than others, even if measurement of that metric is difficult. </p>
<p>Given that, consider the following:</p>
<ul>
<li>If innovation is positively correlated with engineering ranking and higher GPA’s, then the fact that the finance and consulting industry tend to poach from students with high grades from top-ranked engineering schools (i.e. MIT, Stanford), then that must represent a loss of innovation to the world.</li>
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<p>*If innovation is not correlated with engineering ranking and GPA, or is indeed negatively correlated, then that raises the question of why MIT and Stanford are considered to be high prestige engineering schools, and why engineering companies tend to prefer hiring graduates with high grades for jobs where innovation is crucial.</p>
<p>I’m content to discuss either option. But pick one.</p>
I think Sherlock Holmes said it best: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” I happen to find it implausible that the best and brightest engineering talent is leaving engineering for rote, unimaginative jobs in finance so that they can make more money and enjoy more “prestige”. Even if it does require a reevaluation of what constitutes “promise” - as some other posters have suggested (I don’t think it necessarily does) - I don’t feel like it’s obvious we can reject the result because it doesn’t agree with intuition. What would the point of experimentation be, then?</p>
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Most people aren’t highly educated in art history, but that doesn’t mean they are deeply and meaningfully influenced by it. Ignorance of history doesn’t mean that you aren’t the product of it. Artists grow up seeing art that was produced in the past, that is being produced at the same time, and are making new art. What art historians do is to preserve, understand, and thereby make possible advancement in art.</p>
<p>Besides, as I’ve said before, I am not qualified to defend art historians against you, nor is the real argument even about art historians. The notion that technical and engineering innovation is somehow superior to other forms of innovation is the real issue, and I don’t think trying to crucify art historians is adding any weight to your assertions.</p>
Once a suitable definition of innovation is arrived at, this seems like a purely empirical question to me. Sample a few hundred engineers at random, measure their “innovation”, take the average rank of their school(s) over the time they were there, and find the correlation. There are actually two technical problems here:</p>
<p>(1) Operationalize “innovation”
(2) Determine a meaningful “ranking”</p>
<p>I’m not convinced we’ve done either, although once we do, I’d love to read the paper(s).</p>
Given those assumptions, you are asking me to believe one of the following:</p>
<p>A) Engineering companies have devised a system to identify innovative engineers but irrationally choose not to pay wages high enough to attract them.
B) Engineering companies are not really able to identify innovative engineers.</p>
<p>^ Actually, other options are possible. For instance, consider C:</p>
<p>C) Engineering companies have devised a system to identify innovative engineers and rationally choose not to hire those whose productivity would not justify their salary requirement</p>
<p>But have we in fact eliminated the impossible? Have we actually eliminated anything at all? </p>
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<p>Um, no they don’t. Art curators perhaps preserve art and therefore make possible its understanding. But that’s not what most art history grads end up doing. </p>
<p>If you disagree, then consider the destinations of the Art History grads from Berkeley, one of the top art history programs in the world. Seems to me that the vast majority of them did not take jobs in the art industry. Nor did they take jobs in finance or consulting (apparently one guy became a carpenter, another became a bartender). </p>
<p>That’s why I hesitated to even bring this issue up, because I feared that it would instigate a long digression (which it has). </p>
<p>But to be clear, I have nothing against the discipline of art history per se. However, what is undeniable to no-one is that the sciences and engineering underwent an epistemological revolution starting a few hundred years ago that allowed them to consistently develop a reliable body of useful, non-obvious knowledge that other fields - art history being one - have heretofore lacked, and perhaps will never achieve. The word ‘science’, and even ‘engineering’ have, whether we like it or not, therefore have become honorifics, to the point that deeming something ‘scientific’ or ‘well-engineered’ has become the equivalent of ‘well-established’ or ‘rigorous’. The same cannot be said for other disciplines.</p>
<p>As a case in point, if we could imagine resurrecting Einstein, we could present to him numerous rigorous, well-established improvements in physics theories since his passing. It’s not clear that we could do the same regarding art history theory if we resurrected an art historian who passed in the 1950’s; certainly not to the same intensity. {Granted, we could show him new art pieces designed since his passing, but those are the contributions of artists as opposed to art historians.}</p>
One of the assumptions sakky makes is that innovative engineers are of great value. He likes to speculate about the awful impacts a lack of innovation has on society. Entry-level finance salaries aren’t that high.</p>
<p>(There’s actually a way all of this fits together; that’s what I’m driving at. I think we’ll get there.)</p>
<p>Actually, I don’t think it’s that hard. The innovation literature has several (admittedly flawed) measures of innovation: number of scientific papers, citations of said papers, number/citation of patents, monetary value of those patents (if those patents are sold), </p>
<p>One could also consider innovation within a social circle: have engineers name the most innovative other engineers who are all within the same social circle (and hence, they all know each other). Presumably certain engineers would be far more likely to be named than would others.</p>
<p>One could surely devise numerous other measurement scales as well. The issue would then be to find a group of metrics that<br>
tend to correlate with each other (what statisticians would call “construct reliability”) and then check with various other scholars of innovation regarding the validity of said construct. </p>
<p>But I don’t think we’re here to write an academic paper. I think we can agree that there is indeed some construct known as innovation, however defined. The issue then is that the construct is either positively correlated with GPA/rankings, or it isn’t. Either way, we have an interesting finding.</p>
<p>I don’t think I need to assume that, for it seems to be easily borne out by the empirical evidence. One only has to note the impressive market capitalizations enjoyed by numerous tech companies, including many startups, to note that the market does place a substantial value upon their innovations. </p>
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<p>Rather than call it ‘irrational’, I prefer to call it ‘socially driven’. Much (probably most) of how firms choose to treat its employees is driven by social considerations. </p>
<p>As a case in point, why is it that Japanese managers in Japanese companies tend to be paid far less than their American counterparts? Seems to have little to do with the relative competencies of the management in the two countries. For example, managers at Toyota and Honda tended to be paid significantly less than the former managers at GM and Chrysler even as those latter firms were heading to bankruptcy. The CEO of Toyota and Honda make about $1-2million a year, whereas former GM CEO Rick Wagoner made several times that. Why are Japanese financiers paid so much less than are American financiers? {Japan, for all its financial problems, at least didn’t instigate a far-reaching global financial catastrophe.} </p>
<p>The reasoning seems to be that Japanese culture fosters a greater sense of egalitarianism and social harmony where a manager who aggressively pushed for a substantial pay package on pain of jumping to a competitor would be committing a grave breach of social protocol, but such behavior is tolerated, indeed expected, in US corporate culture. </p>
<p>{Note, to be clear, I don’t mean to laud Japanese corporate culture, as it has proven to be highly resistant towards the integration of racial minorities and especially women.}</p>