CNN: "Why would-be engineers end up as English majors"

sakky · June 4, 2011, 3:35pm

Sure - enact the same actuarial/underwriting processes that insurance companies use now. That is, examine the performances of past students along with their original applications - which the school registrars all have (or should) - find those covariates that are correlated with poor performance, and then preferentially reject future applicants who have those same covariates. For example, if a car insurance firm discovers that people driving red convertibles seem to generate unusually high claims, then the firm should offer fewer future policies to people driving red convertibles.

Now, obviously that isn’t perfectly reliable. But it’s a significant improvement over the status quo, because it provides an improved probabilistic model regarding who will succeed and who will fail. Health insurance firms right now charge higher premiums (or don’t even insure) people who smoke, despite the fact that not everybody who smokes will suffer from poor health. Indeed, I know a person who smoked several packs a day and lived to be over 90, and only died because he was involved in a car accident. Nevertheless, I doubt that anybody is going to dispute the fact that smoking damages your health and health insurance firms are well within their rights to deny insurance to smokers.

But the numbers are arbitrary, and I don’t think the colleges have to draw a line. Why not let the employers decide? Allow somebody in an engineering program with a 1.5 to graduate anyway, and the employers can decide whether they want to hire him or not.

Like I said before, I don’t see how that’s any worse than how colleges, right now through the creampuff majors, are granting degrees to their less capable students. Even an engineering student with a 1.5 GPA probably is surely more capable than somebody in a creampuff major with a 2.3. So why does the latter person receive a degree but the former not?

But the same argument, I would say that the M.R.'s cover material that the engineers have also been introduced. They have heard of constructs such as entropy, enthalpy, internal energy, ‘free’ energy, and so forth - indeed, the vast majority of them first encountered them in high school chemistry and/or physics. It is then an open question as to why they should then be forced to learn the M.R.'s that mathematically weave these constructs together, particularly when I have never met a single industry engineer who actually uses them.

In other words, you agree that the line is arbitrary.

Again, don’t get me wrong. I also agree that engineers should be required to learn some concepts. But those requirements should be minimal and centered around techniques that practicing engineers actually use. The remainder should be provided as electives.

So why does the teaching of M.R.'s persist?

And yet - shocking - universities continue to offer creampuff majors, surely to the displeasure of the other departments. Do you think the engineering department is proud that the university offers majors where students are notorious for doing nothing?

But again, fine, if the university can offer creampuff majors over the objection of other departments, then engineering departments should also be free to modify their program accordingly.

A non-sequitur. I made no reference to transfer students whatsoever.

It seems that you missed the point that other majors do not presume that the students will choose to pursue the major at a professional level. So why do we assume that engineering students must?

It seems as if you place great faith in the labor markets to adjudicate between the value of different styles of education. If that is the case, then what is the harm of loosening the requirements of the existing engineering major? Those engineering students who choose not to take the most rigorous (elective) theoretical courses will be forced to suffer from reduced career opportunities and salaries, if those courses are indeed valuable. So what’s the problem? What are you afraid of?

It seems to me that your real fear is that we would be degrading the ‘brand integrity’ of the engineering degree. But that then raises the question of why such brand integrity is important in the first place, and the only reason would seem to be that employers are notable to adjudicate properly amongst various job applicants, and have to rely on the integrity of the engineering degree. But to that, I would then say that employers should do a more selective job of hiring and screening. They shouldn’t be allowed to slough off the responsibility of screening to the universities.

[quote]

I agree - we are concerned about now. That successful 4th tier student may not be hired for the most complex and critical job, but he’s still likely being hired for some engineering job, and being hired now.

On the other hand, that failed-out top tier student, right now, is not being hired anywhere, because he doesn’t have any degree at all. That is despite the fact that, again, he is probably more capable than that 4th tier student.

You highlighted the key issue - the problem is what happens right now. Perhaps the top tier student could indeed transfer to a 4th tier school, although that is questionable given the fact that no school - not even a 4th tier school - desires admitting students who flunked out of their previous school. But even if he could, that doesn’t help him right now.

Which is sadly an unprovable and unfalsifiable claim. It would be nice if somebody could actually demonstrate that certain aspects of engineering education - such as the M.R.'s - truly were necessary for graduates to, as you say, successfully identify and develop those specialties that they will use. I don’t know how you would even go about trying to demonstrate that.

The line would recede greatly from where it exists today. Far fewer students would be failing.

Then the answer is simple: Don’t hire them. If your employer hires people who you consider to be incompetent, then you should take that up with your hiring manager. If your employer chooses to co-develop with companies who employ engineers that you consider to be incompetent, then you should take that up with your business development manager.

I said it before and I’ll say it again: the 4th tier engineering schools produce plenty of relatively untalented graduates, particularly at the low end of their grading spectrum. Somebody with a 2.1 GPA from a 4th tier engineering program is probably not a stellar engineer. But he still gets to call himself an engineer. He still gets to enter the engineering labor pool. If your employer thinks that he is unworthy, then they should not hire him.

By the same argument, if somebody graduates from an engineering program without the supposedly crucial theory coursework, then your employer shouldn’t hire him either. So what’s the problem?

If you are truly so worried about unworthy engineers entering the labor force, then let’s eliminate all unworthy engineers. In particular, I would say that many of the 4th tier engineering programs should probably be shut down entirely, or only allowed to grant engineering degrees to their very best students, and certainly not anybody with a 2.1.

sakky · June 4, 2011, 4:01pm

Many other factors are surely knowable. For example, if one particular high school is notorious for producing many EECS students who then flunk out, then the answer is to admit fewer students from that high school. Either that high school performs a poor job of preparing its students for the rigors of EECS, or a highly disproportionate percentage of irresponsible students just happen to attend that school. Either way, the number of admittees from that high school should be deprecated.

Uh, I’m not complaining about myself. What 's done is done.

I am concerned about future students. What is going to happen to the next student who flunks out because he can’t understand the M.R.'s, yet could be a perfectly competent engineer anyway? As another poster here said, M.R.'s are not even required at other schools. Presumably a student who flunks out of the former school because he doesn’t understand the M.R.'s could have become a fully fledged engineer had he gone to the latter school. So why does the former school have to flunk students out because they don’t understand the M.R.'s, when other schools don’t?

Nice - so you’re asking me to prove something that has yet to be done. That’s like asking me to ‘prove’ that we can send a man to Mars. Of course I cannot ‘prove’ it, because it hasn’t been done yet.

But we could try to do it. That is what I advocate. We could match the records of past students with their applications and look for key correlations. That’s an easy statistical data mining job. It’s hard to believe, given the mountain of data available from past students and the increasing sophistication of statistical tools, that you wouldn’t be able to find something.

Put another way, it seems highly infeasible that grades and SAT scores - which are the two variables that are most commonly used today, are the only two predictive variables that would determine future success. For example, I have a very strong suspicion that participation, and especially, success in high school STEM competitions would be highly indicative of a students’ future engineering GPA. Somebody who wins the Intel STS or the Math Olympiad is probably not going to flunk out of an engineering program.

Really? So somebody who graduated with a 2.1 from a 4th tier - but accredited - engineering program nevertheless has solid abilities?

If that is the case, then that only bolsters my position. Like I said, it is almost certain that somebody who flunks out with a 1.9 GPA from a top-tier program probably is better than somebody with a 2.1 from a 4th tier program. Nevertheless, the latter person will receive an ABET accredited degree, whereas the former receives no degree at all. Why the difference?

Would anybody like to make the argument that somebody with a 2.1 GPA from a 4th tier school is clearly more capable than somebody with a 1.9 from a top tier school?

I know Berkeley and that’s what I will concentrate upon the most. However, Berkeley surely isn’t such an outlier such that it is the only school with unnecessary requirements. I suspect that many schools implement unnecessary requirements in their own way.

And similarly we are now trying to persuade more students to take engineering courses. Both Barack Obama and George W. Bush have implored more Americans to study engineering and technology. But that goal is unlikely to be achieved if engineering majors continue to foist requirements that students don’t really need to know. {Again, I’m not stopping anybody from learning anything: those students who want to learn M.R.'s are free to take the corresponding elective.}

I said it before and I’ll say it again: history majors welcome students who may not necessarily want to be professional historians. What’s so outrageous about engineering majors becoming more welcoming to engineers who may not want to be engineers?

sakky · June 4, 2011, 4:12pm

Then if that is truly the case, then we should immediately shut down the 4th tier schools, or at least, vastly restrict the number of engineering degrees they are allowed to confer. After all, how truly competent is somebody with a 2.1 GPA from a 4th tier school? Is that person truly prepared to practice in the field?

If the answer to those question is ‘yes’, then why not allow somebody with a 1.9 GPA from an elite engineering program to graduate? Again, I don’t see how that guy is any worse than somebody with a 2.1 from a 4th tier program.

And, lets’ face it, we as a nation are not particularly exacting when it comes to public safety anyway. Let me put it starkly: every time we grant a driver’s license to a 16-year-old kid, we are putting his and others lives in jeopardy. {Heck, every time a car is sold, public safety is jeopardized, as the driver of that car may not even hold a license at all and could be of any age.} Over 40,000 Americans die in car accidents every year, and 3 million are injured (a shocking 1% of the entire population every year). Yet I don’t see any mass groundswell to restrict the conferral of drivers’ licenses or the sale of cars in the name of public safety.

So why should engineering education be singled out? If we truly want to improve public safety, there is far bigger fish to fry. What’s so great about working in the most structurally sound office building in the world, only to die in a car accident while driving home?

sakky · June 4, 2011, 4:16pm

I don’t mind curriculum variation per se. The problem is with curriculum variation of requirements, and particularly with weeder requirements. Why should you be forced to learn something - and be weeded out if you don’t learn it - while students in the same major at another school are not required to learn it at all?

If you must weed students out, you should weed them out based on topics that other schools also require them to know. For example, if a Berkeley EECS student can’t perform basic circuit analysis, fine weed him out. But there is no need to weed out people if they don’t understand exotic topics that EECS students at other schools don’t know and never need to know.

Soon2BEngineer · June 4, 2011, 5:12pm

Wow.

I…I can’t believe you took the time to type out all that.

sakky · June 4, 2011, 5:13pm

I’m a fast typist.

noimagination · June 4, 2011, 5:41pm

Nice - so you’re asking me to prove something that has yet to be done. That’s like asking me to ‘prove’ that we can send a man to Mars. Of course I cannot ‘prove’ it, because it hasn’t been done yet. 

But we could try to do it. That is what I advocate. We could match the records of past students with their applications and look for key correlations. That’s an easy statistical data mining job. It’s hard to believe, given the mountain of data available from past students and the increasing sophistication of statistical tools, that you wouldn’t be able to find something. 

Put another way, it seems highly infeasible that grades and SAT scores - which are the two variables that are most commonly used today, are the only two predictive variables that would determine future success. For example, I have a very strong suspicion that participation, and especially, success in high school STEM competitions would be highly indicative of a students’ future engineering GPA. Somebody who wins the Intel STS or the Math Olympiad is probably not going to flunk out of an engineering program.

Your current solution is to only admit students who can succeed. Fine, let’s do that. But the burden is on you to show that we can actually achieve this goal. Nobody here is arguing that it would be bad to only admit qualified students. I simply don’t think that your solution will work.

I’m not convinced that the participation rate - let alone the success rate - in STEM extracurriculars is high enough to fill engineering quotas. Are you seriously arguing that only USAMO finalists should be admitted to engineering programs?

I guess I don’t understand what your problem with the status quo is. How does a student with a 1.9 benefit by being allowed to graduate? What exactly is wrong with the status quo?

You’ve given an example from Berkeley to talk about “unnecessary requirements.” In the past, you’ve talked about typical GPAs at Berkeley as an example of how engineering programs grade too harshly.

Look, concepts like necessity and harshness are subjective judgments that lie on a spectrum. Some examples are so far down the spectrum that we all agree they are unnecessary. Others lie a little closer to the middle, and more disagreement develops.

Requiring Maxwell Relations for a chemical engineering degree is far enough down the spectrum that most of us probably agree it doesn’t make sense. But we don’t have any idea where it lies relative to other requirements.

We don’t know that other courses required for ChE at Berkeley are similarly unnecessary.
We don’t know that other departments at Berkeley have similarly unnecessary requirements.
We don’t know that other ABET-accredited departments are similar to those at Berkeley.

Individual anecdotal data points don’t imply very much about the broader population.

First, efforts to boost engineering enrollment are based on the idea that we need more scientists and engineers at work in the USA. Having students in engineering departments is simply a means to that end. If more students enter engineering programs and then pursue other careers, that does not achieve the goal.

Second, I already gave you a reason why history programs are so welcoming to students who won’t become historians. There isn’t enough demand for historians to meet the supply history departments need to produce. The same isn’t necessarily true for engineering.

sakky · June 4, 2011, 6:13pm

I don’t think much burden is placed upon me at all: after all, I am simply advocating what insurance companies have done for centuries in underwriting policies to determine whether to ‘admit’ an insurance customer. Actuarial science is a well developed profession that supports a multi-trillion dollar worldwide insurance industry, and I don’t see why some of the same techniques can’t be leveraged in the college admissions process.

I’m just using it as an example. Surely, given the reams of past data that colleges have sitting in their data repositories, they could come up with a quite impressive list of covariates to determine the likelihood that a particular applicant is actually going to graduate. Again, that’s what insurance companies do every day.

Let me turn the question around: why should somebody with a 2.1 from a 4th tier school be allowed to graduate? I don’t think he is any more competent than somebody with a 1.9 from a top school. If one should graduate, why not the other? Otherwise, flunk out both of them.

The core question is - why should schools deny somebody an engineering degree if that same person could have almost certainly obtained an engineering degree had he simply gone to another school? I think it is quite likely that the guy with a 1.9 from an elite engineering school could have gotten at least a 2.1 at that 4th tier school.

So why not just give him the degree? Note, you’re not requiring that anybody has to hire him for an engineering job. Engineering employers still have to decide whether to hire him or not. But what is the harm of letting him enter the engineering job market? If some engineering employer wants to hire him in spite of his low grades, what’s the problem? Why do you want to actively prevent him from entering the job market when graduates from 4th tier schools who are less competent than he is are entering the market?

I agree - we don’t know. But that only means that we should find out. Like I said, we already know of at least one example - the M.R.'s - where there seems to be some agreement about its unnecessariness (detractors such as cosmicfish notwithstanding). Why don’t we identify some others and eliminate those as well?

Like I said, what I advocate is that we actually investigate the most common tasks that practicing engineers actually perform, and then have those be the requirements. We should then convert other topics into electives.

But that’s happening anyway, for as I’ve discussed on other threads, many engineering students at top programs such as MIT and Stanford do not work as engineers at all, instead opting for alternative careers such as consulting or finance. It is a great irony that so many of the students from the very best engineering programs do not actually want to be engineers.

But more to the point, the more students who enter engineering programs, the greater chance that some of them will indeed choose to work as engineers. Not all, but some. Similarly, the more students who choose to major in history, the more that some of them will actually choose to become professional historians. {Put another way, if nobody ever majored in history, then we would soon have no professional historians.}

By opening the doors, you’re giving people a chance. Right now, many people don’t even dare to try engineering because of its infamous reputation for harshness and grade deflation. Some of them might have become terrific engineers if given the chance.

Let me give you an example. I know a guy who had an outside scholarship that would pay for his entire schooling, but required that he maintain a 3.0 GPA on pain of losing the scholarship. He therefore didn’t even dare to try to major in engineering for fear of losing his funding, even though he had top-flight science and math high school grades and scores. He might have become a stellar engineer. We’ll never know because he was deterred from even trying the major in the first place.

noimagination · June 4, 2011, 6:56pm

I’m not sure why you think this hasn’t been tried. Statistical analyses have been done on the correlation between various admissions variables and future college GPA, with abysmal results. You have to have criteria before you can develop an effective model.

What do you have in mind? Maybe this is possible, but I’m not sure what data would be appropriate.

Let me turn the question around: why should somebody with a 2.1 from a 4th tier school be allowed to graduate? I don’t think he is any more competent than somebody with a 1.9 from a top school. If one should graduate, why not the other? Otherwise, flunk out both of them. 

The core question is - why should schools deny somebody an engineering degree if that same person could have almost certainly obtained an engineering degree had he simply gone to another school? I think it is quite likely that the guy with a 1.9 from an elite engineering school could have gotten at least a 2.1 at that 4th tier school. 

So why not just give him the degree? Note, you’re not requiring that anybody has to hire him for an engineering job. Engineering employers still have to decide whether to hire him or not. But what is the harm of letting him enter the engineering job market? If some engineering employer wants to hire him in spite of his low grades, what’s the problem? Why do you want to actively prevent him from entering the job market when graduates from 4th tier schools who are less competent than he is are entering the market?

First, the GPA distinction is arbitrary. If you set it at 2.1, it is still arbitrary.

But second, you’ve never identified any reason why this is a problem. Either way, the student is screwed. He probably isn’t going to get a job. In the status quo, universities maintain the tradition of awarding diplomas only to students who pass a certain arbitrary benchmark. Even if it serves no utility, why is change warranted?

Go for it. In some cases, topics you consider irrelevant will be deemed valuable by most others. Maybe those topics should remain in the curriculum. But you probably could find a few that should be eliminated.

This would be a good project for you to undertake. You should start at Berkeley, since you know it best. I think this would be a fine community service effort.

But if you are suggesting that universities should contribute resources to this, I think you need to provide more evidence of flaws in the current system than a single anecdote.

And, if anyone is interested in reviewing that argument, they can profitably refer to: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/engineering-majors/1100866-most-prestigious-job-company-high-tech-5.html#post12410197[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/engineering-majors/1100866-most-prestigious-job-company-high-tech-5.html#post12410197</a>

I stand by what I have written.

Is this really true? Unless there are job openings for historians going unfilled because of a total lack of qualified applicants, I don’t think we’d necessarily see more professional historians if history enrollment doubled tomorrow.

How do we solve this? Simply raise all grades?

sakky · June 4, 2011, 8:21pm

The current model - with no variables at all - is also rather abysmal: one need only look at the flunkout rates in engineering majors. A statistical model could only help.

I’ll offer some examples. Perhaps it is found that those people who score lower than a certain value on the SAT Physics Subject Test - or who never even take it all - comprise a disproportionate percentage of engineering flunkouts. The response would then be to admit fewer such students in the future.

However, it should be emphasized that the model doesn’t have to be causal, or for the correlations to even be plausible. For example, red cars are often times targeted for higher premiums, or are not even offered policies at all, by car insurance companies. Is it that driving a red car makes people more aggressive drivers, or is it that dangerous drivers just happen to like driving red cars? Who knows and who cares? All that matters is that the relationship is statistically stable (and we would have to check periodically to see if the relationship remained stable).

Which is why - at least at the top engineering schools, they probably shouldn’t set a threshold at all. But in any case, I don’t think anybody is defending the currently set 2.0 threshold at the top schools.

The student is far less screwed under the reformed rule. Let’s be perfectly honest - in this day and age, you basically need a degree for almost any decent job. It doesn’t matter all that much what the degree is in, or even what grades you have. What matters far more is whether you have a degree or not. Having a degree, even with low grades, is far better than not even having a degree at all. You can’t even get an interview at many companies without a degree.

Put another way, the difference between having a 2.3 and a 2.1 is miniscule. But the difference between a 2.1 and a 1.9 is gigantic: for it means that you won’t have a degree at all.

And to that, I would ask - why? Somebody with a 1.9 in EECS almost certainly worked harder and is more talented than somebody at the very same school with a 2.1 in American Studies. So why does the latter person get to have a degree but not the former?

The fact that the attrition rate in engineering is so high should be evidence enough that the system is flawed.

And I stand by what I wrote. To those who continue to disagree, tell me why so many engineering students from the top programs choose not to work as engineers?

You seem to think that the number of jobs in any particular field is static. Actually, they are dynamic, and determined largely by societal interests. For example, the more people who major in history, the more people who become interested in history, which then generates jobs for people who work in the history field, whether as history professors, documentarians for the History Channel, history high school teachers, and the like.

Actually, we should probably have grade parity amongst subjects. Engineering professors should not be allowed to consistently confer lower grades than do professors in other majors. Engineering grades should probably be raised, while grades in creampuff subjects should be forced to decline.

*You argue in the report that grading disparities between science/technical fields and less technical ones are scaring off American students: is there evidence for that? My sense is that most people (certainly including graduate schools) know which disciplines are harder and take that into account when comparing students. Or were you seeing students at Duke who were planning on studying applied math, were scared off by B’s and B-minuses, and switched to art history instead? — Abigail, Calif.
A.

Duke is actually a good example of the loss of talent in science and technology that happens in college.

Unlike most colleges and universities, Duke’s undergraduate engineering school has a separate admissions office. Every year it has to oversubscribe its admissions because many students will leave the engineering school and transfer into arts and sciences after a year, typically majoring in the social sciences. When you ask students why they make this move, they often say it’s because of the workload and grading.

There is also significant attrition across college campuses when it comes to potential biology majors, typically those who initially wanted to go into medical fields. Again, the driver for this attrition is workload and grading.

There are those who argue that this attrition is a good thing, and I would agree to some extent. We don’t want mediocrity in the design of our bridges and machines, or in a hospital operating room. But some of this attrition is undoubtedly unnecessary.

I don’t want to dwell on Duke, but many of those who move out of engineering have the talent to excel. In conversations with them, I have heard a common story about seeing people in dorms partying away and wondering, “Why not me?”

That’s what I mean by unnecessary (and harmful) attrition. I don’t believe that the sciences and engineering should demand less of their students. Rather, the social sciences and humanities need to demand more.*

[Grade</a> Inflation: Your Questions Answered - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/grade-inflation-your-questions-answered/]Grade”>Grade Inflation: Your Questions Answered - The New York Times)

ucbalumnus · June 4, 2011, 8:23pm

Indeed, the study [url=<a href=“http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=265]here[/url”>Publications | Center for Studies in Higher Education]here[/url</a>] on the predictiveness of various admission factors and UC GPA indicates that even the combination of high school GPA, SAT I, SAT II, parents’ education, family income, and high school API rank explains only 26.5% of UC GPA variance.

Of course, this is for all majors at all UCs. Presumably, there would be some differences if narrowed to specific majors (or groups of similar majors) at a specific school. And the result may be somewhat better, but it does seem hard to believe that even within a specific major at a specific school, these admissions factors would explain even half of the variance in UC GPA. (And if you want UC to do a more detailed study on the subject, you should lobby UC, or perhaps the authors of the study in question, to do so, instead of writing paragraphs about Maxwell’s Relations on these forums.)

ucbalumnus · June 4, 2011, 8:28pm

Actually, general trends in grade inflation are that science, not engineering, tends to be the least grade inflated (with engineering being similar to social studies and humanities being the most grade inflation – of course, specific schools and departments may differ) ([source](<a href=“http://www.gradeinflation.com/tcr2010grading.pdf]source[/url]”>http://www.gradeinflation.com/tcr2010grading.pdf)</a>). And the supposed “weed out” courses that engineering students take as freshmen and sophomores are mainly science courses. So you may want to complain about science department grading being too low and humanities grading being too high, relative to the grading of subjects in between (social studies and engineering).

sakky · June 4, 2011, 8:57pm

And I have. But this is the engineering forum, after all, so I am going to concentrate on engineering grading here.

noimagination · June 4, 2011, 9:12pm

See ucbalum’s link.

Maybe so, maybe not. How many companies require a bachelors degree for a job yet don’t ask to see a transcript/GPA? Honest question - I don’t know the answer.

The attrition rate certainly doesn’t prove anything about whether curricula are relevant.

So, when more people major in engineering the demand for aircraft or HVAC systems or chemicals goes up? Because people are more interested?

sakky · June 4, 2011, 9:35pm

See ucbalum’s discussion in his 2nd paragraph in post #71.

Answer: probably most. I’ll tell you this, not once in my entire life have I ever been asked by an employer to produce a transcript. Nor do most people that I know. It is sufficient to say that you have a bachelor’s degree - and that that fact can be verified by the registrar - rather than actually having to produce transcripts.

The natural question then is to ask whether all of that attrition is necessary - which is also exactly what Stuart Rojstaczer of the NYTimes article has been asking as well.

But some of this attrition is undoubtedly unnecessary..

[Grade</a> Inflation: Your Questions Answered - NYTimes.com](<a href=“http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/grade-inflation-your-questions-answered/]Grade”>Grade Inflation: Your Questions Answered - The New York Times)

Oh yes. Absolutely, and I’m surprised that you don’t see why.

One clear reason is that engineering fosters innovation. And the more innovation you have, the more engineering jobs you foster. For example, Apple engineers invented the Ipod, which then in turn was combined with cellular technology to become the Iphone, whose underlying platform was opened via the App Store, which has then created tremendous job opportunities for enterprising developers to create apps. Thousands upon thousands of new engineering jobs - both within and outside of Apple - have been dynamically created through the Ipod/Iphone ecosystem. None of these jobs would exist today if those original Ipod engineers had not actually been interested in engineering.

I also continue to return to my basic point: many (almost certainly most) firms will choose to hire nobody at all rather than hire somebody who they don’t think has the capabilities to succeed at the company. Jobs are not servings to be doled out like numbers at a deli counter. Companies dynamically decide who they want to hire and how many.

I’ll give you an historical example. When DEC was floundering, AMD dynamically decided to raid many of the best DEC engineers to design a new microprocessor that eventually became the Athlon. Those jobs were dynamically created, as AMD didn’t want to just hire any engineers, but rather specifically wanted to hire the best engineers from DEC. If they couldn’t hire them or other star engineers , they probably would have chosen to hire nobody at all (or at least, nobody mediocre).

The upshot is that very few jobs are truly ‘fixed’. Rather, jobs are generated in a dynamic manner. An engineer starts a company that fosters a new technical innovation, which in turn generates thousands of new jobs. But that would never have happened if he had never became interested in technology in the first place.

noimagination · June 4, 2011, 9:59pm

^ I’m not seeing the link to engineering students yet. Certainly, more successful engineers in the workforce can achieve those various effects. But how does admitting engineering students who aren’t interested in becoming engineers achieve that goal?

Also, you are horrified that engineering students choose other careers when available yet you advocate for programs which are “welcoming to engineers who may not want to be engineers.” What is the difference?

Which is surely something we should foster in K-12, right?

noimagination · June 5, 2011, 11:57am

Sorry, but I don’t think you can have it both ways. If this is true, it is because earning a degree supposedly indicates some level of accomplishment. Even if the 2.0 boundary is arbitrary, it does set a standard. If someone can graduate without meeting any standard, the bachelors degree no longer means anything at all. At that point, examining the transcript becomes essential.

MSmom_amp_dad · June 5, 2011, 12:23pm

I’ve just read trough this thread and am mystified by the discussion of Maxwell’s relations. This is a SMALL part of any competent thermodynamics course. It’s favored by any decent chemE program, but will occupy ONE lecture (at most) during a course. Why devote time to this? Because it shows the interdependence between thermoD variables and especially that a hard to measure experimental property can be reevaluated in terms of something easy to measure. Why is this so difficult? Why should we stop learning this? Chemistry and physics students routinely study Maxwell’s equations. They are just not that difficult.

hadsed · June 6, 2011, 4:07am

Taking sakky’s arbitrary line argument to its logical conclusion, someone with a 0.00 GPA should also get a degree, because maybe they failed all of their classes only because everyone else simply knew so much more than them? Perhaps at the average or below average institution they would’ve had more reasonable grades. Again, the pass/fail line is also arbitrary, so the GPA cut off at any point is arbitrary. Obviously this is absurd. Colleges admit people based on their perceived abilities when they’re accepted, and then the engineering dept. writes up the curriculum and grading system based on the quality of the students (partly). This gets us to the classic slippery slope argument; of course there’s hardly a difference between a 1.9 and a 2.0, but the school sets the standard at 2.0 cutoff and that’s the end of it. You might argue that students shouldn’t be anywhere near the cutoff in the first place, and most employers have already this preconceived notion (from who knows how long ago) that below a 3.0 is not ideal, but around 2.0? Good luck getting a job at that point. There are other ways for people with bad GPAs to get jobs, obviously, and this doesn’t really address the main point of the arbitrary-ness of the grade cutoff directly I realize, but it turns out that, even in the engineering department, everything can’t be as black and white as you’d like.

I remember the first time (it might have been the first time) you mentioned this Maxwell’s relations argument in a thread long ago, and initially I had nowhere near enough knowledge but now I think I might be able to say something useful about it. In my experience, there is no substitute for going through a derivation, reading your textbook to the letter, or doing lots of homework problems when looking to get a solid grasp on the material from the most primal core ideas. Your argument is hinging on the fact that this has no real use outside of academia, but this can be true for a lot of things, and will be different for every person in relation to the work they do now as an engineer. There is simply too much application of different principles to learn them all whilst also learning enough theory to constitute a solid understanding of the topics. Of course, I think that this was never the intention of universities in the first place. I haven’t met too many people who could go straight into a job and start to do useful work immediately (that is, within a year) when graduating with a B.S. This all depends on your perspective of what is important for an engineer to learn, and my take is that it’s extremely important to know the basics of these topics. Your earlier analogy with Real Analysis isn’t a strong one, because there is a certain limit to how much you need to know to be a good engineer. That is, you don’t need to know how to prove Stoke’s theorem to be able to even do some good theoretical physics stuff. You absolutely should know how thermodynamics works to the core if you’re going to be designing a machine people will use every single day that generates a controlled explosion inside of its engine (automobiles, of course), or a vehicle that flies hundreds of meters in the air with a velocity of around 500 mph with possibly hundreds of people on it. Furthermore, those who really understand the topics and think about them on a deeper level will probably be more likely to come up with innovative ideas and methods for solving different problems (it only makes sense).

However, I can offer a somewhat different, more cynical perspective on this. It might just be that it doesn’t matter whether you force students to know the derivation of Maxwell’s relations or not, because some students simply will not have the knowledge, will-power, curiosity, or intelligence to put themselves through the grueling process of learning such advanced material. Surely everyone at Berkeley that takes that initial weeder course knows about multivariate calculus, and if they don’t they should be bright enough to learn about it on their own. This is something that happens in physics a lot more often I feel like, because more people that are in physics are in it because they are passionate, curious, and willing, above all else, to learn the living hell out of anything physics-like they can get their hands on. It may just be that most engineers want things spoon-fed to them, and it may just be that the top students are the ones who take the initiative to learn more than their classmates. In this sort of cut-throat ranking system, there will always be losers, but for those who are looking for the best players in the game, it’s a great system.

hadsed · June 6, 2011, 4:10am

Taking sakky’s arbitrary line argument to its logical conclusion, someone with a 0.00 GPA should also get a degree, because maybe they failed all of their classes only because everyone else simply knew so much more than them? Perhaps at the average or below average institution they would’ve had more reasonable grades. Again, the pass/fail line is also arbitrary, so the GPA cut off at any point is arbitrary. Obviously this is absurd. Colleges admit people based on their perceived abilities when they’re accepted, and then the engineering dept. writes up the curriculum and grading system based on the quality of the students (partly). This gets us to the classic slippery slope argument; of course there’s hardly a difference between a 1.9 and a 2.0, but the school sets the standard at 2.0 cutoff and that’s the end of it. You might argue that students shouldn’t be anywhere near the cutoff in the first place, and most employers have already this preconceived notion (from who knows how long ago) that below a 3.0 is not ideal, but around 2.0? Good luck getting a job at that point. There are other ways for people with bad GPAs to get jobs, obviously, and this doesn’t really address the main point of the arbitrary-ness of the grade cutoff directly I realize, but it turns out that, even in the engineering department, everything can’t be as black and white as you’d like.

I remember the first time (it might have been the first time) you mentioned this Maxwell’s relations argument in a thread long ago, and initially I had nowhere near enough knowledge but now I think I might be able to say something useful about it. In my experience, there is no substitute for going through a derivation, reading your textbook to the letter, or doing lots of homework problems when looking to get a solid grasp on the material from the most primal core ideas. Your argument is hinging on the fact that this has no real use outside of academia, but this can be true for a lot of things, and will be different for every person in relation to the work they do now as an engineer. There is simply too much application of different principles to learn them all whilst also learning enough theory to constitute a solid understanding of the topics. Of course, I think that this was never the intention of universities in the first place. I haven’t met too many people who could go straight into a job and start to do useful work immediately (that is, within a year) when graduating with a B.S. This all depends on your perspective of what is important for an engineer to learn, and my take is that it’s extremely important to know the basics of these topics. Your earlier analogy with Real Analysis isn’t a strong one, because there is a certain limit to how much you need to know to be a good engineer. That is, you don’t need to know how to prove Stoke’s theorem to be able to even do some good theoretical physics stuff. You absolutely should know how thermodynamics works to the core if you’re going to be designing a machine people will use every single day that generates a controlled explosion inside of its engine (automobiles, of course), or a vehicle that flies hundreds of meters in the air with a velocity of around 500 mph with possibly hundreds of people on it. Furthermore, those who really understand the topics and think about them on a deeper level will probably be more likely to come up with innovative ideas and methods for solving different problems (it only makes sense).

However, I can offer a somewhat different, more cynical perspective on this. It might just be that it doesn’t matter whether you force students to know the derivation of Maxwell’s relations or not, because some students simply will not have the knowledge, will-power, curiosity, or intelligence to put themselves through the grueling process of learning such advanced material. Surely everyone at Berkeley that takes that initial weeder course knows about multivariate calculus, and if they don’t they should be bright enough to learn about it on their own. This is something that happens in physics a lot more often I feel like, because more people that are in physics are in it because they are passionate, curious, and willing, above all else, to learn the living hell out of anything physics-like they can get their hands on. It may just be that most engineers want things spoon-fed to them, and it may just be that the top students are the ones who take the initiative to learn more than their classmates. In this sort of cut-throat ranking system, there will always be losers, but for those who are looking for the best players in the game, it’s a great system.

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