What % of your classmates changed majors away from engineering?

sakky
Fri, 04 Jul 2008 17:14:26 +0000

Many people already are disgruntled they couldn’t get those things. Giving free engineering degrees would not create more of these people.



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



Maintaining a high proportion of engineers in our workforce is a good thing.



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 (in this case, the salary) of that something actually goes down. That’s a basic law of supply and demand. I would therefore expect the lowered salaries to result in an even lower interest in people actually working as engineers. They might get the free engineering degree, but then the lowered salaries would make them even more likely to pursue some other career.

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