<p>Note that job prospects will vary by discipline. The oil and aerospace industries, for example, tend to go through boom and bust cycles that affect their new grad hiring needs. Often, it seems, the discipline that is hottest when one is picking a major as a new freshman has cooled off by graduation time.</p>
<p>Better to focus on what you really like than to try to guess what will be hot four years later.</p>
<p>I agree with Karp even though I’d say if your gpa is 3.0+, have some experience, and have marketable skills then no. </p>
<p>On the other hand, if you have a 2.0 and have never had any work experience then yes you will not find a job.</p>
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<p>It’s tough out there in many places. Maybe you’re in one of them.</p>
<p>In 2010, only a third of UC Berkeley Mechanical Engineering graduates had jobs: <a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/MechEngr.stm[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/MechEngr.stm</a></p>
<p>Civil Engineering was even worse. Only 18% had jobs; the rest were either unemployed or forced to go to grad school to wait out the recession:
<a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/CivilEngr.stm[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/Major/CivilEngr.stm</a></p>
<p>Job placement rates for the lower-tiered UC’s (UC San Diego, UC Riverside, UC Santa Barbara, and several others) aren’t available, but I suspect those numbers are even worse.</p>
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Then your son happens to be in a lucky place. Cal Poly SLO had nearly 100% job placement for Civil Engineering majors during the worst part of the recession (mid 2009), and many lesser-known colleges in the Midwest also have excellent job placement stats.</p>
<p>^ True. You gotta be willing to move.</p>
<p>Great data, NegativeSlope. If things are tough at Berkeley, they are likely worse in schools with weaker reputations.</p>
<p>I’m sure some of those “forced” to enroll in grad programs might well have planned to do that regardless of the job market, but I think your take that many choose grad school as a remedy for no job is correct. In 2007, 132 engineers went to grad school and 285 found jobs. In 2010, the split was about even at 158 and 154.</p>
<p>Man, that Berkeley survey always gets misinterpreted. The reason the numbers are as low as they are is because of WHEN Berkeley takes the survey. That survey is, for the most part, a snapshot of the employment status of graduates AT graduation. Cal Poly SLO’s numbers are so amazing because the time frame of the survey extends out much longer than Berkeley’s. When you control for the timing of the survey’s, Bekreley and SLO’s placement rates are almost exactly the same.</p>
<p>This thread is giving me hope and scary me about Engineering. Well I will be a freshman in college next fall working on a BS in Electrical Engineering. I was hoping how the future looks for this area. Do you think I should do a different type of Engineering? Many people I talk to have suggested that doing EE would be a good path because it can flow into a lot of other branches, do you agree with that? Can someone expand more on the MS limiting your job availability and it not being so useful as people have stated. Just want to get some insight to what I should prepare for.</p>
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<p>I don’t know you enough to say whether EE is right for you or not. 95% of all the electrical engineers I work with are controls engineers, and they are certainly a different type of folk; something of a hybrid between a computer engineer with ADD and a control freak. If that suits you than it is probably a good major. Also, I think if you stick with EE, ChemE, ME, Civil, or Computer Engineering/Science than your industries stay rather open.</p>
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<p>My take on the MS is that if you get an MS and have 0 years experience you will be competing for the same jobs as those with BS’. However, you will probably have a leg up on them for the job, but a lot more debt to take care of. That may have changed, but as a hiring manager I don’t think it has much in my industry. Still, I see MS’ move up the ladder quicker than BS’, and generally they do have intern and lab experience out of school. Some jobs require a MS, for whatever reason…</p>
<p>@Medwell - while I would usually agree with about the unemployed being at-fault, the recession is definitely NOT over. It’s over when the unemployment rate is lower than 5%, when people can stop worrying about getting fired every day and when people start to buy like spoiled brats again.</p>
<p>Don’t forget that while only 34% were employed during that survey, another 42% were planning to attend graduate school. Believe me, there are only a handful of people who go to graduate school due to lack of a job. In reality, that means 3/4 of the Berkeley grads in that survey were employed or in graduate school and only 25% weren’t doing something with their degree. Only 17% of those were truly unemployed.</p>
<p>I swear, people need to learn to interpret statistics.</p>
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If they have jobs, people no longer need to be worried about getting fired. Despite high unemployment, layoffs are quite rare now:
[5</a> Unemployed for Every Job Opening - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/5-unemployed-for-every-job-opening/]5”>5 Unemployed for Every Job Opening - The New York Times)</p>
<p>(from the article)
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<p>The problem is a lack of hiring. Recent college grads are being hit hard by this.</p>
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That’s right! There’s a huge difference between high unemployment states like California (12%) or Florida (11%) and low unemployment states like Nebraska (4.2%) or North Dakota (3.6%):</p>
<p>[Unemployment</a> Rates for States](<a href=“http://www.bls.gov/web/laus/laumstrk.htm]Unemployment”>Unemployment Rates for States)</p>
<p>MAthauburntutor said the following with tongue in cheek…
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<p>The OP was also asking about outsourcing/offshoring and their effect on jobs - both in finding a job , BUT JUST AS IMPORTANT, in KEEPING the job. I can see a scenario where the younger person might get the engineering/CS job then a few to 10 yrs down the road, offshored/outsorced. I think the BLS stats for 10 yrs down the line indicates significant outsourcing risk to certain types of jobs - computer related. I believe I saw this mentioned on the engineering majors subforums.</p>
<p>Companies are able to go after the offshore labor without paying the appropriate extra fees due to the US gov’t looking away and not enforcing the abuse of the H1b visa system where US companies displace US citizens’ jobs with offshore labor. They get to have the stability of USA on this side of the drink, good infrastructure, no monsoons, safety, healthy air, good place to live , but then use the labor of outside of our shores to make their profits. </p>
<p>I would like someone to address this since my son has chosen computer engineering at UIUC next Fall as a freshman.</p>
<p>Hopefully, I’m not committing some sort of CC faux pas since I’m not the OP, but could anyone comment on the prospects of biomedical engineering?</p>
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<p>What we really need to know is: </p>
<ol>
<li><p>How many people are underemployed in the group of people who are employed and
the group of people who didn’t turn in the survey? </p></li>
<li><p>How many people attended graduate school because they didn’t have any other options? This is basically impossible to quantify, because we don’t know what job graduates would need to get in order to not go to graduate school. I do find it feasible that graduates would go to graduate school to avoid unemployment/underemployment. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>Nonetheless, I do have to commend Berkeley for being this transparent. Some of their graduates are doing very well.</p>
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<p>Well I can tell you that in my experience - which is admittedly anecdotal but still some sort of window into graduate studies - there aren’t many people who are here simply because they couldn’t get a job. I know of one person here who is in graduate school because they didn’t have a job, but he admits that he didn’t look very hard. Everyone else that I know is here because they wanted to be.</p>
<p>In general, the number of people in graduate school as a result of the economy is usually overblown. It isn’t like graduate schools are going to lower their standards or admit a ton of extra people, so you would expect roughly the same number of people to be in graduate school now as during a boom economy. Of course the fact is that as far as I know, there hasn’t been a study addressing the problem, so I suppose we don’t have any scientific evidence, but these have been my own personal observations.</p>
<p>Engineering graduate school is hard to get into. It’s not some trivial back-up option that anybody can just waltz into as a last alternative to getting a job.</p>
<p>The people who get into engineering graduate programs are already among the best of their graduating classes. Most of these folks will have an easier time finding jobs than not.</p>
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<p>You’re confusing H1B worker visas with offshoring jobs. None of the H1B jobs are offshore. If they were, there would be no need for a visa in the first place. The impact of H1B positions on college engineering graduates is debatable (imho), but not related to offshoring positions.</p>
<p>Are there any studies out there about offshoring engineering jobs? This gets brought up so often, but I haven’t seen anything yet. I’ve mostly heard about IT positions being moved out of the country, but the vast majority of such positions weren’t really “engineering” jobs to start with.</p>
<p>There are still many jobs that deal with national security, defense and aerospace which will always be in the US. Think about it. The defense budget is $400 billion+ every year and every decade there will be a war/conflict. For this you need engineers in the US. I am sure the DoD is finding deficiencies in weapon systems in Libya and new ones must be developed, but it will take a decade to get them in place.</p>
<p>One of my friend works in Oracle. The company’s policy is if there is employee resign, the company will not recruit new emplyee in US. The new openning will be filled in India. The company my wife working, a well-known US top ten one. has the same policy. It is very sad.</p>
<p>Those who use the economists definition of recession are technically correct in saying that the recession is over. However, this does not necessarily translate into the existence of an environment where companies are willing to hire at a normal scale. Until companies decide to have confidence in the government and the world economy in general, nobody will be hiring at a normal rate. Therefore, yes it is more difficult than normal to find a job in almost every sector of the economy these days. To confine the problem to strictly engineering jobs is not the correct point of view. When everybody is hurting, which they are, there is a much greater cause of the problem at hand, outsourcing being a product of it all. If I were a corporate executive right now, I wouldn’t be wanting to hire as much either, especially during times of such volatility.</p>
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<p>Yeah, no. Such anecdotes are never useful. Please link us to a statement made by Oracle that this is their policy. If not, anecdotes are useless.</p>
<p>There are hundreds of open US positions listed right now on Oracle’s site. I won’t link to it, since it’s against the PG, but you can check out their iRecruitment site.</p>
<p>And frankly, this would be an insane strategy. What’s the logic of offshoring jobs 1 by 1? When a company moves jobs, they’ll lay people off and move entire teams. There’s absolutely no reason to move jobs one by one as people resign. What are they going to do, have 3 people working in the US in an empty campus 30 years from now?</p>