What % of your classmates changed majors away from engineering?

sakky
Fri, 04 Jul 2008 19:30:57 +0000

The point was that engineering employment can grow. Additional government coaxing might be needed. Simply put, the average citizen in our country depends on staying competitive at the highest level of value creation.



Sure, but I question whether that goal is really achieved by simply pushing more people to get engineering degrees without changing the end-demand for engineers. I doubt that it is.

As a case in point, consider the recent history of China and (especially) India. These countries aren’t really producing that many more engineers (as a % of their population) than they were 30 years ago. In fact, back in those days, many graduates of the Indian Institutes of Technology couldn’t find good jobs (and hence, many of them ended up immigrating here). What changed in recent history in those countries is not educational reform, but rather economic reform. Both of those countries unshackled their private sectors, and that spurred immense value creation and improvements in competitiveness (and also vastly increased the demand for engineers in those countries).

The point is, the real problem is not, and has never been, the supply. The real problem is with the demand.



Technical innovation is the quickest way to gain wealth on a countrywide scale (other than using natural resources, but that is a game of luck). It’s a virtual prerequisiste for becoming an OECD nation.



Well, I would actually argue that political/economic reforms are the true quickest way to national wealth. The Soviet Union/Russia, for example, had plenty of technical innovation, graduating immense numbers of engineers per year, and being the first nation to send a man in space and the 2nd nation to develop nuclear weapons. Yet that didn’t save its economy from stagnation and its people from poverty.