Article re: Engineering in America today

<p><a href="http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/08/25/engineers_dont_get_enough_respect/%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/08/25/engineers_dont_get_enough_respect/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Ioannis Miaoulis is the director & president of Boston's Museum of Science and was the dean of the Tufts School of Engineering.</p>

<p>It is true that engineering is not highly respected in the US. However, to me, the problem doesn't really have anything to do with educational standards or initiatives to foster engineering knowledge among the kids. It's really a matter of priorities and demand. The fact is, many American kids don't learn engineering because they don't WANT to learn engineering, and the reason why they don't is because they don't think the payoff is good enough. What many kids want is what they see on TV, and what they see on TV is that the way to quick success is through pop culture. None of the kids in my neighborhood want to become engineers, instead they want to become the next Lindsay Lohan, the next American Idol, the next LeBron James, the next Usher, the next Eminem. They want it for a simple reason, those people are all famous glamourous millionaires. I swear, if the kids in my neighborhood were spend as much time studying science and math as hard as they do playing and practicing sports, we'd mint a whole slew of stud engineers. Yet the fact is, they would rather spend all their time playing sports, because they see sports as the path to greatness, not engineering.</p>

<p>Even of those people who realize that becoming the next great rapper or great athlete is not in the cards, a lot of them would still rather do something else besides engineering. Even many people who get engineering degrees don't really want to be engineers. I believe the top employer of graduating engineers at MIT this year was not an engineering company. It was McKinsey, the management consulting company. A large chunk of the engineers at MIT are running off to consulting and banking, and even of those who aren't, a lot of them wanted to take such jobs but couldn't get an offer, so they have to 'settle' for engineering jobs because they couldn't get what they really wanted. This ain't some scrub no-name engineering school we're talking about here - this is MIT. This is the best engineering school in the country, and we have all these engineering students who'd rather not be engineers. Nor is this peculiar to MIT. I know at the other top engineering schools like Stanford, Berkeley, Cornell, Michigan and the like - there are also plenty of engineers running off to consulting, banking, or other glamorous non-engineering jobs. These are the best engineering students in the country - some of the best human capital we got - and even many of them don't want to work as engineers. </p>

<p>Why is that? Simple. More money, more prestige, more glamour, basically more of what they're looking for in consulting or banking than they would get in engineering. One MIT engineering graduate who is joining McKinsey put it simply. At McKinsey, he will make more money than he would as an engineer. He will get to travel around the world, which is something he wants to do. And, perhaps most importantly, as he pointed out, he knows that the McKinsey name looks good on the resume. </p>

<p>What sickens me the most is when US business leaders pontificate about how the US needs to produce more engineers and more scientists, yet they refuse to improve the work conditions and compensation of the engineers. It doesn't work that way. As long as engineering companies are unwilling to belly up to the bar and make offers to the engineers that are comparable to what the consulting companies and banks are offering, then you're going to continue to have the best US talent leaving engineering. </p>

<p>The point is, I don't think you can 'push' science/engineering knowledge onto the kids. It has to be a 'pull' mechanism. Kids will learn it only when they want to learn it, and the only way to get them to want to learn it is to improve the endgame incentives. Kids want to be LeBron James because they see him making millions on TV. MIT engineering students want to work as Wall Street bankers because they know that bankers make a lot of money. Basic economic principles dictate that people respond to incentives. The fewer incentives you give, the fewer people who are going to do what you want them to do.</p>

<p>Well put sakky.</p>

<p>Sakky - I agree with a lot of what you are saying. Money, prestige, power - Bill Gates aside, that isn't to be found in engineering.</p>

<p>I disagree about not being able to get kids into the sciences. IMO, it's a retention problem, not an attraction problem. I got into science in middle school. We had a Science Olympiad team which was extremely successful - nationals for years on end. Practices started in September for the March states. About 1/4 of the school tried out for 15 slots on the team. For me, that sparked an interest in science - and, over a decade later, I'm still a science nerd.</p>

<p>Then again, I left engineering. If I get a good job in two years, I'll be making more as my starting salary than most of the senior engineers at my old firm. I have a litany of complaints about engin., but am also convinced that it could be a great profession for a lot of people. Relative to most other professions, the salary is good; companies will pay for your master's; you aren't working 80-100 hours per week; and, for women who want to have families, it's great because you can wrap up your projects, take time off for the kids, and then return. </p>

<p>There is a difference between kids & college students - and kids can be interested in engineering and the sciences. There is the other gap, though, as they grow up, and you illustrated that beautifully.</p>

<p>By the way, what is your background? A few of us have been scratching our heads, trying to figure it out.</p>

<p>Now let me be clear. I don't want to toss too much dirt on engineering. When you're picking what you want to major in as an undergrad, you could do a LOT worse than picking engineering. By studying engineering, you will develop a keen, logical frame of mind, and you will also be able to look at yourself in the mirror and say that you accomplished something academically difficult, as opposed to all the bull***** majors out there in which you really can graduate while barely lifting a finger. Furthermore, I have always agreed that an engineering degree is extremely useful for providing a 'backup career' in the sense that if you want some other job (like consulting or banking) but can't get it, you can always fall back to doing engineering which will deliver a decent paycheck. That's far more than the guys who majored in Art History or Film Studies can say. Hence, when you're talking about what you should major in as an undergrad, I still think engineering is a pretty good choice, relative to most of the other choices out there. </p>

<p>However, the fact remains that there is a war for top talent out there, and anybody who can survive an engineering curriculum at a decent school is top talent. Engineering companies have not shown that they are willing to provide the opportunities to talented people the way that consulting companies and banks are. And then those engineering companies "complain" that they can't find enough talented people. It's a simple truism of economics that there is no such thing as a true shortage - that the more you are willing to pay for a particular good, the more of that good you will get. In other words, prices serve as signals that ripple through the greater economy and indicate to various economic entities how much of a particular good to supply. As long as banks and consulting companies are willing to pay more, either in terms of cold hard cash or in terms of intangible compensation like prestige, than the engineering companies will pay, then you will always have top talent preferring consulting/banking over engineering. If the engineering companies don't like that, then they have to bid up what they are willing to pay. That's basic labor economics. </p>

<p>I will point out that there are a few engineering companies that "get it". Most notable right now is probably Google, a company that not only pays well, but brings the strong intangible factors of prestige and coolness. Google is also unapologistically elitist in their hiring - generally only hiring the very best engineers from the most prestigious schools. However I would say that Google is no more elitist than the top consulting companies and banks are. In fact, you would say that that elitism adds to the prestige of Google because having Google on your resume signals that you were good enough to survive the Google hiring process, the same way that listing Goldman Sachs or McKinsey on your resume signals that you were good enough to get hired. In that sense, you could say that Google has become the McKinsey or the Goldman Sachs of the engineering world. Yahoo, Microsoft, and a few other engineering companies also "get it" and realize that they have to compete hard for top talent. </p>

<p>But the fact remains that a lot of other engineering companies don't seem to be interested in competing for top talent. So on the one hand, they complain that they can't get top people. On the other hand, they're not willing to make attractive offers or construct interesting career paths for that talent. Hey, you can't have it both ways. If you want those topflight MIT and Stanford engineers to turn down McKinsey and Goldman Sachs to work for you, you are going to have to come up with something comparable to what McKinsey and Goldman Sachs offer. The talent is there. The question is whether you're willing to pay for it. If you're not willing to pay for it, then you have only yourself to blame. </p>

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By the way, what is your background? A few of us have been scratching our heads, trying to figure it out.

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<p>You know I don't answer questions about my biography publicly. However, my email and PM are open.</p>

<p>To continue this discussion, just think about even the 'prestige' engineering companies and notice how their top management is often times filled not by people who rose from the engineering ranks, but people who came from consulting and banking. </p>

<p>For example, take Oracle. The most powerful person at Oracle is obviously Larry Ellison, the founder of the company. However, look at the people right below him. Greg Maffei, Safra Catz and Charles Phillips - none of these people are real engineers, in the sense that they worked their way up from the engineering ranks. Instead, all of them are former bankers - Phillips was a former Managing Director at Morgan Stanley, Katz was a former Managing Director at DLJ, which is now part of Credit Suisse First Boston, Maffei was former VP at Citicorp (now Citigroup). </p>

<p>Or take Dell. Michael Dell handed off the CEO reins to Kevin Rollins last year. And who is Kevin Rollins? Former VP and partner at the prestigious management consulting company Bain. </p>

<p>Take Sun Microsystems. The CEO of Sun is Scott McNealy, one of the original founders of the company, and who was never an engineer. His heir apparent, Sun's President and COO, is the 'wunderkind' Jonathan Schwartz who was never an engineer, but was a former consultant at McKinsey. </p>

<p>The list goes on and on. The point is, even at the premier engineering companies, people can't help but notice that the people who have power often times came from consulting/banking instead of engineering. People see that and realize that if they want to make it to the top, engineering may not be the best way to go. When companies fill their executive ranks with former consultants and former bankers, that's a tremendously strong signal about what the company really values and what it takes to advance at that company. </p>

<p>The point is, if even engineering companies are going to continue to pass over engineers in favor of former consultants/ bankers for top management roles, then many of the best engineering students are going to inevitably prefer to be consultants/bankers instead of engineers. It's all about setting the right incentives and expectations.</p>

<p>i thought engineering was prestigious.</p>

<p>so if some internet site came out saying engineering wasn't all that then it must be true? </p>

<p>maybe the author of the article didn't get into the engineering school he wanted and is therefore exacting his/her revenge.</p>

<p>Engineering IS prestigious, relative to most of the other choices of major you could make as an undergrad. I maintain that it is far better to study engineering than, say, Film Studies. </p>

<p>The question is, whether engineering can stack up to the 'premier' career paths like consulting and Wall Street banking. And the sad truth is, probably not. </p>

<p>It's not just a matter of what one author says or doesn't say. If it was a simple matter as that, then I would agree with you that it could be dismissed. But what can't be dismissed is the fact that consulting and banking are considered to be some of the most desirable industries to work in by engineering students, whether at MIT, or Stanford, or Berkeley, or at many other engineering schools, that many people who end up taking engineering jobs or go to engineering graduate school would rather be working in consulting/banking but didn't get an offer, that many companies, even engineering companies, will populate their top management with a disproportionate number of consultants and bankers as opposed to engineers. These are facts that cannot easily be dismissed.</p>

<p>Engineering, for many people, is prestigous... but just "not prestigous enough." It's the highest paying major straight out of undergrad, but it tapers off after that; engineering is probably the lowest-paying professional degree.</p>

<p>I do think that engineering is a professional degree (not pre-prof., as some high school students keep asking/saying).</p>

<p>Sakky is dead-on about being able to survive engineering at a top school. Finance companies will drool over engineers - even in rough economies, they will always get interviews and offers. </p>

<p>Consulting/i-banking are probably the two best careers/most prestigous. Engineering, though, isn't even in the tier below it. When I told people that I was going to law school, their reactions (for the most part) were, "That's great!!" If you say that you are going for an advanced engin. degree, the reaction is, "Oh, good for you." I honestly found that to be a little startling - esp. considering that, IMO, engineering is harder than law school.</p>

<p>I think that it just isn't out there. I knew about engineering only b/c my parents told me about it b/c the rich people in town did engineering or some sort of science job. They knew I liked math & science and might be interested in it. I wanted to do chemistry after all. I don't really think people understand anything about it rather than it's hard.</p>

<p>When asked how many of their parents (just parents) were engineers in my chemE course half of the students raised their hands. After any relative all of them except like 5 (including myself did). Most popular parenting jobs of the kids in my classes were 1) Engineering . . . way lower . . . 2) Doctor 3) Teacher. Who would be the people that would understand the difficulty, prestige, and power of such a major? Those would.</p>

<p>It is obvious why a engineering parent is common. Interesting story tho: When my doctor found out about my major she was impressed. She knew several chemEs and knew it was a tough as nails major. In addition, all the teachers know due to success of their students and them being the type to pay attention to that type of thing.</p>

<p>More to the point, I think what the author was trying to say was something I've heard people observe from their experiences in other countries.</p>

<p>In Europe and other foreign countries, engineering is commonly (as in, by the average Pierre or Juan or Ahmad or Giovanni on the street) seen as a highly esteemed profession, akin to being a lawyer or a doctor.</p>

<p>In the United States, engineering is commonly seen as being a <em>trade</em>. Look at the ivies. Not strong in engineering, in general. Where are the strongest engineering programs? A lot of them are at typically agricultural schools. (Hello, cornfields. UIUC.)</p>

<p>It's a general feeling. The hard part is figuring out where that feeling comes from, how engineering education is seen in other countries, how various cultures value engineering knowledge-- the knowledge how to <em>do</em> things in ADDITION to how to <em>know</em> things, as opposed to the general pursuit of knowledge-- and what we can do to 'fix' how our culture views these values. Coming from a big-city/snooty-society situation, I know that engineers aren't seen as academicians, the way chemists and physicists are. Engineers are the ones with mud on their boots, to a certain extent.</p>

<p>Which is cool, because I'm taking my third class on mud now, and I like it that way. Doesn't do much for the esteem of my profession, though.</p>

<p>There's no <em>one</em> reason. It's a potpourri of things. We can debate this 'til the cows come home, and I don't think we'll be able to find a single reason, or even a specific reason, why engineers are often viewed this way in some parts of this country, but the most we can do as engineers is to present ourselves well and do a good job.</p>

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Engineering IS prestigious, relative to most of the other choices of major you could make as an undergrad. I maintain that it is far better to study engineering than, say, Film Studies. </p>

<p>The question is, whether engineering can stack up to the 'premier' career paths like consulting and Wall Street banking. And the sad truth is, probably not.

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</p>

<p>but all that wall street stuff is mostly based on luck. engineering is solid and doesn't really depend on forces outside of some stock market control.</p>

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but all that wall street stuff is mostly based on luck. engineering is solid and doesn't really depend on forces outside of some stock market control.

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<p>The Wall Street jobs are NOT based on luck or gyrations of the market anymore than engineering jobs are. I'm not talking about becoming a finance speculator. That is, to some extent, based on luck, although I think there is a whole lot more skill than people think there is. No. I'm talking about high finance occupations like investment banking, asset management, hedge funds, and that sort of thing.</p>

<p>If you don't think that engineering is heavily affected by market forces, you should have seen Silicon Valley during the dotcom crash where thousands of engineers and computer scientists got laid off from tech companies. Many engineers didn't find work for years, and some still haven't. You should have seen Houston and the Texas Gulf Coast in 1998 during the last oil crash when oil plummeted to $10 a barrel and chemical/mechanical/petroleum engineers were being laid off left and right. Even now, you can take a gander at the US auto makers and suppliers around Detroit - all of them have announced major cutbacks in workforce and because their blue-collar labor is unionized, they have no choice but to go after white-collar workers, meaning the engineers. </p>

<p>Look at it this way. You can make so much money on Wall Street that you can easily weather any layoffs. For example, I know a guy who worked on Wall Street as a entry-level analyst for 2 years, and then get laid off. However, he managed to put away so much cash in the bank that it didn't phase him. He just lived a life of leisure for a while, and then went to an elite private B-school, which he could afford to pay for in cash without having to take out any loans. Seems like a pretty good life to me.</p>

<p>wow you seem to be very passionate about this subject, saaky</p>

<p>What can I said, it's a tremendously interesting subject to me. The fact is, there is a mismatch of incentives or, to use economics terminology, a market failure here. American tech companies complain that they can't find enough top American engineering talent, and yet much (not all, but a lot of) the top American engineering talent would rather go work in other fields like consulting, banking, or in ariesathena's case, law. Basic free-market economic theory would dictate that companies would respond to that purported labor shortage by simply offering better salaries/work-conditions/career paths/whatever up to the point where people become indifferent between working as engineers and running off to some other industry. But, apart from a few exceptions (i.e. working for Google or Yahoo), that's not really happening. Hence, this is an example of a market failure: engineering companies can't or don't want to establish a proper free-floating market for top engineering talent. </p>

<p>I find the state of engineering to be interesting, and I find market failures to be interesting. Put them both together, and that's doubly interesting.</p>

<p>Great points Sakky. I could not agree more. It is strange how everywhere else in the World, Engineers are regarded as the "top of the food chain", but in the US, it is considered just a notch above blue collar. I think that's partly because the US is a marketing-led, consumer-based society. Europe and Asia are more Engineering-led, product based societies. Of course, I am generalizing, but I think that holds true for the most part. That's why in the US, Lawyers, Doctors, corporate executives and most of all, entertainers and athletes, make outrageous amounts of money compared to their European counterparts, to say nothing of the glamour that comes with such high-paying professions. It is no wonder that it takes so much effort to attract the younger generation to the sciences.</p>

<p>Sakky,</p>

<p>You (and others) keep saying that engineering is a great safety major (which it certainly is) and you keep saying that it's better off than majors like "film studies". But let's compare engineering to something more powerful. </p>

<p>Let's say we're looking at a school like Cornell, Berkeley, or Michigan. What would be a more powerful major if you compared......chemical engineering and a strong business major like applied economics in these schools? Or, if you compared something like accounting and some other kind of engineering? What about when you compare engineering to math, physics, chemistry? Certainly, these other majors are much more powerful than "film studies".</p>

<p>Also, can you elaborate more on what you mean when you're talking about 'consulting' jobs? I've heard a lot about consulting in the IT industry where you have to have excellent computing and programming skills. I haven't heard much about consulting / engineering. What other kinds of consulting jobs are there?</p>

<p>Alexandre, how does the pay for engineering jobs in Europe compare to the pay stateside? Not necessarily through a straight monetary conversion, but with cost of living and such factored in, which engineers are better off?</p>

<p>[edit]Average engineers...obviously there will always be a few at the extreme high end who made fortunes [Google, etc] :).</p>

<p>In Europe, I would say Engineers have a slightly more elevated standard of living than Engineers in the US. But that's not the point. The point is that in the US, Lawyers, Doctors, Corporate Executives and celbrities have much higher earning potential and the glamour that comes with it. In Europe, that doesn't exist...not to the same level anyway. Of course, you have your freaks, like Zinedine Zidane, but for the most part, I would say the above observation is pretty accurate.</p>

<p>in asia, however i believe that the entire system to dedicated to PRODUCE engineers/science majors. positions in schoos are limited, for example my cousins in china had to test to get into middle schools/high schools/college. grades and test scores basically are made the center of their lives and those that dont do well in middle school (B/C students) are encouraged not to attend high school (they are encouraged to attend technical schools). the schooling is highly focused on mathematics/science as well, so basically anyone who attends college is going to be good at it. in addition majors in college are pre-determined by the school based upon your test scores, so the hardest engineering/science majors are reserved for the best and the brightest. so basically everyone who comes out of college (matter of fact anyone who GOES to college) is going to be good at the basics that allow for someone to excel @ engineering/science</p>