The counterintuitive side of engineering

ucbalumnus
Fri, 04 Mar 2011 20:45:56 +0000

Deekku:

I am actually shocked that Cal Poly has the highest starting salary for all CA public universities. I would have assumed it would have been Cal.



Major by major, CPSLO starting pay for bachelor’s degree graduates is generally lower than for UCB bachelor’s degree graduates, but job placement rates are higher (see some comparisons a few posts up).

However, CPSLO students tend to favor majors with better job and career prospects (engineering and business) far more than UCB students do, which makes the overall pay levels for CPSLO bachelor’s degree graduates higher than for UCB bachelor’s degree graduates. (Of course, if you count the unemployed as earning $0 and average that in, then the comparison becomes more advantageous for CPSLO both on a major by major basis and overall due to higher job placement rates.)

Warning: speculation ahead.

It is possible that differences in student attitudes toward purpose in school may have something to do with it. UCB seemed to have a lot of the following types of students:


“Academic idealists” who ignore job and career prospects of various majors or course selections, perhaps buying into the idea that they just need to get a degree from a good university and a good job will be waiting. That may have been more true several decades ago, but not so much now.
Students narrowly targeting graduate or professional school, including medical and law school. Such students often select majors and courses that preclude a “plan B” if they do not get into graduate or professional school. Molecular and Cell Biology is the most popular major at UCB, for example. If GPA gamesmanship for medical and law school leads a student to select “easy A” courses, s/he may end up learning less than average, which can be a major problem if s/he does not get into medical or law school. Those seeking graduate school in an academic field may not be visiting the career center early enough to get the best opportunities, at least as a backup option; if they do not get into graduate school, or do not attend for whatever reason, they may then be starting the job search too late, with diminished prospects.
Smart but lazy students. Unfortunately for them, laziness often leads to course and major selection that is not helpful for post-graduation job and career prospects, and grades too low for graduate or professional school.


On the other hand, the heavy bias by CPSLO students to “preprofessional majors” (engineering and business) may reflect a greater tendency to have a job and career motivation and purpose for being in school. Such students may be more likely to do job and career oriented things, like more aggressively seek out internship jobs and visit the career center at an early stage as graduation approaches.

Would anyone here have any more insight as to whether such speculation is actually the case, or if there is something else completely different going on?