What % of your classmates changed majors away from engineering?

Mr_Payne
Fri, 04 Jul 2008 17:23:06 +0000

It doesn’t solve the real problem, which is to create more and better engineering jobs, which is (I thought) the real goal.

The real goal is to create a better situation for the median citizen. Not create a better situation for engineers. More engineers means more innovation. A simple look at patent production makes this exceedingly clear.



In fact, doing what you suggest almost certainly makes things worse, because with more people graduating with engineering degrees, there would be more competition for engineering jobs, hence driving engineering salaries down.

Higher engineering salaries is not the goal. More economic growth is the goal.



See above. The situation would actually be worse. Simple economics dictates that when you increase the supply of something but don’t increase its demand, then the value of that something actually goes down. That’s a basic law of supply and demand.

In the short term yes. However, in the long term I would have to disagree. South Korea did not always have a lot of engineering jobs. Japan did not always have a lot of engineering jobs. Neither did Israel. However, engineering is one of the few professions where more jobs are created by producing more of them. Producing more lawyers does not create more law jobs. However, producing more engineers creates a situation for more economic development.



The real solution is to increase the demand for engineering jobs. Not the demand for engineering degrees, but for actual jobs.

I talked about this in the last paragraph.