<p>
Ditto.
This will be the end of the world.</p>
<p>And those statistics are coming from engineering graduates from the top public school in the entire country? Dire times, dire times indeed.</p>
<p>[Well-Educated</a> Job Hunters Still Stuck - WSJ.com](<a href=“Well-Educated Job Hunters Still Stuck - WSJ”>Well-Educated Job Hunters Still Stuck - WSJ)</p>
<p>That should add a bit of fuel to the fire. The good news is that once things hit rock bottom the only way they can go from there is up. So cheer up! :)</p>
<p>Unless you are a pessimist and say they may stay flat forever… ;)</p>
<p>What is going on here?</p>
<p>These stats for UC Berkeley are completely different that those for the Lehigh Class of 2009, which show only 5% still seeking jobs:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www4.lehigh.edu/Media/Website%20Resources/pdf/admissions/LU_placementsummary09.pdf[/url]”>http://www4.lehigh.edu/Media/Website%20Resources/pdf/admissions/LU_placementsummary09.pdf</a></p>
<p>It is difficult to be believe that there is such a difference in these two schools.</p>
<p>here is UCB’s again:</p>
<p><a href=“https://career.berkeley.edu/CarDest/2009Campus.stm[/url]”>https://career.berkeley.edu/CarDest/2009Campus.stm</a></p>
<p>Ok, here is one difference:</p>
<p>Lehigh - as of Jan 2010 for the Class of 2009
UCB - as of May 2009 for the Class of 2009</p>
<p>and</p>
<p>Response rate:</p>
<p>Lehigh - 86%
UCB - 32%</p>
<p>maybe at UCB, the students with jobs and graduate study plans decided not to respond?</p>
<p>One thing that I don’t understand. How many engineering graduates do we have each year? Roughly speaking, 100k ? I suppose?
So in ten years we have 1 million of them. Let say 1/4 of them quit engineering, and turn to work for something else. we still have a lot of people. and how can we create that many job?
I am so not convince with the numbers of employment given by BLS.</p>
<p>We don’t really have that many people retired. Moreover, there are many technical immigrants, and outsourcing. I can understand what supply and demand means (the better market, the more jobs you need to create). But even when the economy is good, there should be time where jobs are pretty damn low in supply.</p>
<p>I’m starting to really believe that the whole “shortage of STEM graduates” is a cynical ploy to drive down wages by giving the jobs to foreigners. How else do you explain 30-60% unemployment among berkeley engineering graduates if there is such a dire shortage?</p>
<p>Also, one thing I noticed by looking at all these career placement surveys is how incredibly overrated networking, especially alumni networking, is. The number of students who obtained employment through networking ranges from 8% to 18% on all the surveys I looked at, and it’s usually about 1% who get their jobs through alumni.</p>
<p>jwxie, I’m not in line with your disagreement with the numbers presented by BLS.</p>
<p>Sorry I’m late to the punch but here is the site I was talking about. I believe it’s differnent than the previous link posted. Same info probably.
[Office</a> of Assessment Spring 2010 Career and Salary Survey](<a href=“http://www.assessment.gatech.edu/2010/06/10/spring-2010-career-and-salary-survey/]Office”>http://www.assessment.gatech.edu/2010/06/10/spring-2010-career-and-salary-survey/)</p>
<p>@ EngineerHead,</p>
<p>What I am trying to say is that we get a lot of engineering graduates each year. Let say the next ten years we have 500k graduates with either BS/BE, MS/ME, or even Ph.D degree. Where and how do we put these people into the work force?</p>
<p>I see BLS stated there are roughly 1.6 million of engineering employment, which is really big. But the last ten years, and the following ten years we probably have about 500k or more graduates from all engineering disciplines.</p>
<p>@jwxie:</p>
<p>We have to think bigger. Some US engineers also compete with international engineers, for example, CS and EE. Other positions an engineer may obtain, like quality control and daily operations control, may also be off-shored along with the manufacturing jobs.</p>
<p>There are also engineering positions filled by non-engineers. Mathematicians and physicists may challenge MechE, AeroE, CS, EE, and perhaps even NE for certain positions. It’s even possible to find the odd or very rare non-STEM person working in certain STEM jobs if those people happened to obtain enough knowledge for that particular job.</p>
<p>Industry has been crying about a “critical” shortage of STEM professionals since the 60s; a few years back, Bill Gates commented on an alleged shortage of CS graduates. But one never sees a significant salary increase for STEM professionals; schools like Berkeley and GA Tech wouldn’t be posting such numbers if we truly had a low supply of qualified professionals.</p>
<p>Someone posted elsewhere on these subforums that a significant number of MIT engineering graduates are opting for non-engineering careers. The reason, it seems, is the high earnings offered by financial firms and other business; I think these people are also looking at the job market and see what we are seeing right now. Of course, things will improve, eventually, but they will probably get a bit worse before that.</p>
<p>I understand your point however we do not know enough to assume so. 178000 new engineering positions, that leaves us with 322000 that need jobs How many of these go into fields outside of engineering - medicine, law, business - accounting, managerial, etc., R&D, etc. I would say half, just because of the business and R&D worlds, so we’ll go with 1/3 just for sakes AND we’ll take this fraction out of the new value (322k) instead of initial (500k) just for kicks (though I think it to be more). This leaves us with 216667 players left. I think we can agree (esp. those who have exp’d or observed) that there are a large number of students who are either where they shouldn’t be or do not choose to fix their work ethics. After that group I would say were down less than 100k now, which I’ll leave up for unknowns.</p>
<p>Geesh…for Georgia Tech:</p>
<p>[Office</a> of Assessment Spring 2010 Career and Salary Survey](<a href=“http://www.assessment.gatech.edu/2010/06/10/spring-2010-career-and-salary-survey/]Office”>http://www.assessment.gatech.edu/2010/06/10/spring-2010-career-and-salary-survey/)</p>
<p>The Office of Assessment is pleased to announce the results of the Spring 2010 Career and Salary Survey.</p>
<p>The survey was administered online to 2,527 students who were scheduled to graduate in May 2010. A total of 1,661 students completed the survey for a response rate of 65.7 percent. The results are representative of the GT graduating population by degree level, gender, and ethnicity. Results are representative by college for undergraduates. The Office of Assessment provides academic units with the ability to obtain specific job titles from students who reported employment. These detailed position descriptions are available in the frequency reports for the individual programs.</p>
<p>Among the salient findings of the survey:</p>
<p>The economic downturn continues to affect placement rates of our graduates:</p>
<p>The proportion of job-seeking Georgia Tech BS recipients who report having a job at graduation declined from 65.8% in Spring 2008 to 56.8% in Spring 2009 to 53.3% in Spring 2010.</p>
<p>The proportion of graduate degree recipients (MS and PhD) who report having a job at graduation declined from 73.2% in Spring 2008 to 55.7% in Spring 2009. However, placement increased to 61.9% in Spring 2010.</p>
<p>Year-over-year placement for undergraduates in the College of Management increased slightly from 49.3% in Spring 2009 to 54.3% in Spring 2010. </p>
<p>Among undergraduates, placement continued to decline for many engineering programs. The placement rate for the College of Engineering in Spring 2010 was 55.3% (Spring 2008: 71.5%; Spring 2009: 59.8 %.) </p>
<p>For some of College of Engineering’s undergraduates, placement rates have declined significantly over the past two years. In Electrical Engineering, placement rates fell from 79.2% in Spring 2008 to 35.0% in Spring 2010. For Civil Engineering, placements fell from 75.6% in Spring 2008 to 46.2% in Spring 2010.</p>
<p>Can somebody rank the different engineering fields from fastest to slowest growing?</p>
<p>Princeton University May 2009 Survey - All Majors - Class of 2009</p>
<p>[Princeton</a> Alumni Weekly: Class of '09: Jobs harder to find](<a href=“http://paw.princeton.edu/issues/2009/10/07/pages/3530/index.xml]Princeton”>Class of '09: Jobs harder to find | Princeton Alumni Weekly)</p>
<p>25% - Graduate School
30% - Found Job as of May 2009
37% - No Job Yet
8% - N/a
100%</p>
<p>Yea, but those numbers from Berkeley, Princeton, and GTech are all AT graduation numbers. A lot of students, especially in a recession, will take anywhere between 3-12 months to find a job.</p>
<p>Inmotion, yes, that is why the Lehigh figures are so much better - because they were the result of a survey conducted in Jan 2010 for the Class of 2009.</p>
<p>It is still surprising how many don’t have job by graduation time, however.</p>
<p>
Always on top is nuclear engineering and mining engineering (perhaps cause there’s only a few colleges out there that offer the appropriate curriculum, and neither sound particularly enticing)…the bottom is generally occupied by ChemE. Other fields have stayed the same near the middle of the pack for years now (EE, CE, CS, SE, CompE), while others (AeroE, PE, materials, etc) fluctuate in growth year by year.</p>
<p>Enginox and engineerhead
thank you for the insight :)</p>
<p>siglio, what would you say about materials engineering in the long run? Surely it won’t fluctuate year to year in the long run. I heard from a teacher of mine that materials will be the fastest growing, can anyone confirm this?</p>