What % of your classmates changed majors away from engineering?

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>Exactly, and that’s part of my point: it gets down to a matter of motivation. Most kids aren’t motivated to do engineering. Heck, even many engineering students aren’t really motivated to do engineering, which again explains why so many of them, upon finishing their engineering degrees, end up working in banking or consulting, or, as you pointed out, going to law or med school. </p>

<p>But my point is, once people, even kids, have the motivation, they can produce at a very high level. For example, I know some kids who are already highly motivated to be the best athletes they can be, because they see that as a way to become famous. Heck, the Olympics are coming up, and we will surely see plenty of competitors who have been training for many hours per day ever since they were literally just kids. For example, 16-year-old world champion and Olympic gold medal contender Shawn Johnson has been practicing gymnastics ever since she was a little girl. </p>

<p>The point is, if you want more engineers, you have to give people the motivation to become engineers. Otherwise, people aren’t going to want to do it. Simply put, as long as engineering doesn’t have - or at least is seen as not having - the potential that other careers offer, then people just aren’t going to be highly motivated to pursue engineering relative to those other careers.</p>

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<p>Medicine and law are graduate degrees, so thats an apples to oranges comparison. </p>

<p>Engineering still takes the cake when it comes to an undergraduate degree for the average student (who is not going into medicine, law, banking, consulting, etc). For the average student (i.e. 2.8-3.0 GPA), graduating from the average school (i.e. Arizona State/CSU Northridge), a 50k-60k starting salary is pretty sweet and the long term career potentials for this kind of student are far better in engineering then any other degree. Engineering is also an excellent foundation for entrepreneurship and joining startups.</p>

<p>But I am in total agreement when it comes to outstanding students and top schools. Engineering is just not as financially lucrative as other available options. Heck, UC Berkeley and MIT chemical engineering graduates actually start at a lower salary then the national average. Maybe its a geographical issue, but still…</p>

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

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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.</p>

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<p>I agree that higher salaries and better career paths = increased motivation = more engineers. ;)</p>

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<p>Good idea, but how do you get around the politics of that decision in universities?</p>

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<p>What do you mean? If the federal government fronted the money it’d be easy…are universities gonna turn away free money?</p>

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<p>If it’s coming from the government, then it would definitely work. I wasn’t sure where you were getting the money from. In an earlier post, you mentioned taking it away from liberal arts departments, so surely they would protest. On the other hand, if this is additional money, then I’m sure this wouldn’t be a problem.</p>

<p>Time to write to your senator!</p>

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<p>I have no idea… we have about 1300 students in ECE here.</p>

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<p>Good point ken285!</p>

<p>I can hear it now………</p>

<p>1: “So what are you majoring in?</p>

<p>2: “Engineering.”</p>

<p>1: “Great! What field?”</p>

<p>2: “Differential Paradigms of Gender Vectors”</p>

<p>1: ???</p>

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<p>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. </p>

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<p>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. </p>

<p>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.</p>

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<p>Yes, of course. Given the current conditions, I don’t expect this country to be able to produce more engineers. That’s why things have to change, and I think they slowly are. Our nation’s infrastructure has been one of the issues in this election year, as well as alternative energies, given the current oil situation. Obama is proposing a $60B National Infrastructure Bank. There’s a bill in Congress that would change the way funds are allocated to infrastructure projects. People are beginning to realize the importance of some of these things, so I think this is a step in the right direction, but it’s still not enough.</p>

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Why do other countries, with very similar economies produce far more engineers (per capita, obviously) than us?</p>

<p>I’m referring to OECD economies & bachelors of engineering.</p>

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Being interested in a profession is not the only reason to do it. I’m sure many humanities majors would love to go back in time and do an engineering degree.</p>

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

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Maintaining a high proportion of engineers in our workforce is a good thing.</p>

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<p>I think it’s simple - because the engineering degree and profession in those countries confers a far stronger sense of ‘social prestige’, relative to other careers. Engineers in Japan and Germany are widely admired within those societies. Same is true of the East Asian developed nations such as S Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, etc. </p>

<p>In the US, that’s not the case. Engineers are seen as ‘geeks’ and ‘nerds’. You receive very little social prestige by saying that you’re an engineer. That’s why a lot of Americans don’t really want to do it. </p>

<p>As Thomas Friedman once said: “In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears – and that is our problem”</p>

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<p>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.</p>

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<p>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. </p>

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

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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.</p>

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Higher engineering salaries is not the goal. More economic growth is the goal.</p>

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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 <em>more</em> 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.</p>

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I talked about this in the last paragraph.</p>

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<p>Fair enough, then we’re talking about different things. I was talking about how to make individual engineers better off. You don’t seem to be interested in that, and that’s fine. </p>

<p>However, getting back to the spirit of this thread, I don’t think the individual engineer really cares about making the world better off, at least, not primarily. He cares about making himself better off. He’s primarily interested in putting food on the table for his own family, not somebody else’s family. </p>

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<p>I would argue that what happened in those countries is that they enacted policies to greatly increase the demand for engineers. For example, it’s quite clear in the case of Israel that much of their engineering demand comes from their military-industrial complex. However, Israel also created policies that allowed military technologies to be successfully commercialized, hence increasing the private sector demand for engineers. Japan and S Korea also engaged in industrial policy to increase their export-oriented businesses, hence, also increasing their demand for engineers. </p>

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<p>Well, actually, I think it does. After all, more lawyers generally means ever-more-complicated laws and regulations, as well as entities suing each other, which therefore necessitates even more lawyers to deal with the increasing complexity and to defend yourself from those lawsuits, etc. </p>

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<p>Ha! There is actually a long-standing debate as to whether patents actually truly means greater innovation, or actually less innovation. Keep in mind that a patent doesn’t give you the ‘right’ to commercialize a particular technology. Not exactly. All it does is prevent others from commercializing a particular technology. Hence, it is a “negative” right. Hence, patents are often times used to actually impede innovation, as somebody may not be actively pursuing his patented technology, but will legally prevent anybody else from also pursuing that technology, hence hindering the overall rate of innovation. What makes the situation even worse are those ‘patent ■■■■■ houses’, who are nothing more than stockpiles of patents, who do nothing more than sue other companies who they deem to be violating their patents, but who do not pursue any technology commercialization themselves. It also forces inventors and tech firms to engage in costly and time-consuming patent searches to make sure that they are not inadvertently violating a patent that they didn’t even know existed. </p>

<p>Hence, it’s actually not clear whether more patents corresponds to greater innovation or not. *In theory *, the patent system is supposed to provide economic incentives via a temporary monopoly for inventors to develop and commercialize intellectual property. However, in reality, much of the current patent system has devolved into an arena for companies to sue/blackmail each other over alleged patent infringement, and the winner is often times simply whoever happens to be able to afford the best lawyers. It’s a fantastic system for the lawyers, but whether it helps the engineers, or society as a whole is questionable.</p>

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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.</p>

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Fair enough. I believe engineers create far more value to the US economy than lawyers do. That is all my point was trying to convey.</p>

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I’m just using patent production as a proxy for technical innovation. Your treatise on patents is a good explanation, but says nothing about my argument. More engineers lead to more patents. More patents is a good proxy for the amount of technical innovation occurring in an economy. Certainly countries with no patent production are generally in very bad shape.</p>

<p>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.</p>

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<p>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.</p>

<p>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). </p>

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

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<p>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.</p>