What % of your classmates changed majors away from engineering?

sakky
Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:45:00 +0000

Giving them a free degree certainly is a lot of incentive to get trained as an engineer. Medical schools & law schools only take in so many students a year. As do consulting firms & investment banks. So what happens when they can’t get one of those high paying jobs? They’ll likely do engineering. And it will be good.



Will it be? You would end up with a bunch of extra engineers in the workforce who aren’t really interested in engineering at all, but just did it for the free degree. In fact, many of them will probably be disgruntled because they didn’t get what they really wanted, which is admission to law/med school, or a job in consulting/banking. I’m not sure that that world would be better than what we have now.



Even with this being the case, we still don’t have enough engineers. That’s the problem.



Actually, I don’t know that we don’t have ‘enough’, for I happen to think these things are economically and sociologically driven. For example, one could also equally argue that we have ‘too many’ consultants and bankers.

I think we actually produce the right number of engineers, given today’s economic and social motivations. If we want to change that number, we have to change the motivations.