Oh, absolutely. Same is true in my family. In my experience it’s common for kids to follow their parent’s path, but by no means universal.
Edit: perhaps instead of “common”, I should say “not unusual”
What is the reasoning behind booing the business school grads? Seems pretty juvenile behavior.
I graduated with a liberal arts degree but the majority of my friends/roommates were in the business school. I guess I don’t get why these students would be booed?
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Guess it varies by area or who you know. I know very few kids or people who followed their parent’s path. Didn’t think it was that common.
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Don’t know specifics about UoM graduation, but I suspect at least part of it relates to a certain level of anti-capitalism sentiment that exists in the US (and around the world) right now.
For my own graduation, any booing by the engineers of my college wasn’t very noticeable (at least unless you were focused on it). I remember it now as being something to laugh at. Didn’t distract at all from graduation. Though it was raining the entire time and only stopped when they went to pass out diplomas (thankfully). My cap looked like a beret at that point.
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Not in my immediate family. Back in the 70s engineering was not so sexy, no stock options, no RSUs, more layoffs from defense, etc…
We’re in SoCal, not the Bay Area. My area has more doctors.
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We have a lot of parents who are doctors at the school I teach at. We also seem to have a lot of dentists…
It seems kind of childish. I could see if they were awarding someone who was universally disliked or controversial, but that’s the case here.
IMO, they are using their last opportunity to openly boo the folks who will be eventually managing them. 
Think Dilbert vs Pointy Haired Boss.
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No boos for the business majors at my son’s graduation last year. Agreed- that would be incredibly rude even if the culprits were half joking.
I suspect if kids are separated at entry based on gpa and scores, and movement between schools is limited, and there are possible pay differences upon graduation, and kids in each of the schools remain insular, then it is possible for resentment to develop. I am sure in a small school things are significantly more cohesive, irrespective of the major – e.g., at a liberal arts college
Back in the day (late 80s, state flagship for my sister’s graduation) I remember at the whole campus commencement…after the serious speeches were done, it came time for the individual colleges to stand up and be recognized.
The mood switched to playful exuberance among the grads. I think it was the engineers, perhaps business, but when they stood for acknowledgement, they chanted “we have jobs! we have jobs!”. Later when they called the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (the largest group, my sister among them), I remember them yelling, “we had fun! we had fun!” It cracked everyone up. It was fun.
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The nickname for Ross Business school students is “Rossholes.” They’re not well-liked, I suppose, but I’m just a parent.
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Your experience is different than the situation we have here in Ontario then. While the data is a little out of date, a survey conducted by Ontario Society of Professional Engineers found that
only 31 per cent of employed people surveyed in 2006 with engineering degrees worked as
engineers. This was the lowest match rate of all the regulated professions the survey compared.
The a subsequent survey conducted in 2011 further determined that:
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Only 29.7% of employed individuals in Ontario with bachelor’s degrees or higher in engineering were working as engineers or engineering managers.
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37% worked in professional positions that normally require a university degree.
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33.3% were not working as engineers and were working in positions that don’t necessarily require a degree.
They further observed that:
It is uncommon to find low percentages of degree holders working in their fields of study in most regulated professions in Canada. However this is the case with employed people who have bachelor’s degrees or higher in engineering, and by a wide margin.
One potential reason proposed for the low percentage of engineering degree holders actually working in an engineering was
parents may be pushing students to enter engineering programs when they really lack the aptitude to be good engineers. This may be because they falsely assume that an engineering graduate will always be able to find a good engineering job.
I did an engg undergrad in a different country. Many of my classmates are in the US. People both here and in the other country moved onto other areas that were more financially fruitful than the major they found themselves in. Engg was considered to be the liberal arts degree at that place and time some 35 years ago. You did whatever else you wanted to do in life after that that made you multiple X more money than engg made you – lot of entrepreneurs in fields other than your major, news paper editors, finance, medicine, authors etc. It doesn’t matter. Fair weather engineers. Truly large scale thinking on what to do with life after.
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Interestingly and topical, this article came up in my newsfeed today
In the middle are those where organizations have sometimes found it beneficial to use the possession of a degree as way to sort through the available workers. Human capital theory in economics sometimes refer to having a degree as a “signal” of a worker’s characteristics that helps a company screen through candidates.
Using degrees in this way has ebbed and flowed over time. At one point, workers could start at some organizations such as banks or manufacturing companies and ascend through the ranks without degrees. While standards have become increasingly tight over the past several decades, especially since the recession of 2008-2009, they are once again changing.
In recent years, there has been a flurry of announcements from companies saying they were loosening up the educational requirement for jobs. Tech firms, which have been finding it difficult to recruit talent for years, have led the list of sectors making changes. According to a report from CompTIA, a non-profit U.S. association for the IT industry, companies including Accenture, Apple, Google and IBM have made substantial changes in their job requirements, eliminating the need for a four-year degree.
A study from the Burning Glass Institute has produced some further numbers as to what is happening in the U.S. By their calculations, between 2017 and 2019 – before the pandemic shook up the labour market – roughly 46 per cent of middle-skill occupations and 31 per cent of high-skill occupations experienced what they call “degree resets.”
Since then, this trend has continued and intensified, although the institute believes that only about 27 per cent of the changing requirements are owing to short term, cyclical responses to the lack of workers; most of the adjustments are “structural,” or part of a deeper rethinking of what skills workers really need.
Good point. My cohort graduated just as the web browser was invented. It’s been 1 big love fest.
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Very interesting post. And a bit sad, especially the last paragraph.
My own experience may very well be skewed by who I know and where I live. Can’t claim it’s the norm everywhere.
Since your information is from the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers and mentions “regulated professions”, it looks like they are referring only to licensed Professional Engineers.
In the US, Professional Engineer licensing is the norm in civil engineering, because civil engineers commonly sign off on designs used by the general public, but is not the norm in many other kinds of engineering where one works for an employer who continues to warrant and support the product or design after it is purchased (various estimates suggest that about 20-25% of those working in engineering in the US have Professional Engineer licenses). In Canada, is it similar, or do those doing engineering work for an employer who continues to warrant and support the product or design also require or generally seek Professional Engineer licensing?
That’s an interesting perspective. I’ve been noticing the “engineeringfication” of different majors for want of another word. That is the application of engineering pedagogy to other disciplines. Software engineering and Management Engineering being examples of this. Many students take their traditional engineering degrees and apply them to other sectors. I know that many finance firms and banks like to hire engineering graduates for their quant skills. They aren’t particularly interested in their knowledge of thermo or fluid dynamics though.
Isn’t that a function of the poor Canadian job market for engineers?
The most recent figure I found was for 2018 and it suggests that 40.3% of engineering degree holders were licensed as professional engineers.