Perhaps because those firms primary work requirement is the title on the diploma, which means that experience (and therefore salary expectation) may actually be a detriment for most of the jobs. Many sales organizations depend on a large number of people whose sole job is to open doors for the REAL salesmen, and that model does not have room for large numbers of experienced personnel earning ever higher salaries.</p>
<p>By contrast, an engineering firm expects the first two years of employment to be a loss - it takes that long for a typical engineer (even most MIT grads) to start generating an output worth their salary. If an engineer at my company leaves after their first year, the company has LOST $30k+. This is not conjecture, it is a real concern at my company that they are trying to address.</p>
<p>Of course, I’m an engineer, and have never worked in finance. I am not sure how many people can really claim to have worked significantly in both.</p>
<p>The top business schools, which feed students into the finance area, typically are made up of students with about 30% engineering degrees, most of those with work experience.</p>
I was aware of that distribution, but in my experience most engineers who are heading for MBA programs position themselves out of core engineering areas as quickly as possible. The engineers I know who went for top quality MBA’s all transitioned quickly into areas like business development and program management - they spent very little time actually working as engineers. I do know several career engineers who went for MBA’s, but they generally didn’t care about program prestige and never went into finance.</p>
<p>"Of course, I’m an engineer, and have never worked in finance. I am not sure how many people can really claim to have worked significantly in both. "</p>
<p>I did… (if 2.5 yrs in engineering is “significantly” enough)</p>
Then you would agree that for the person not to take the job in finance, given the opportunity, desires their engineering position moreso than the potential finance position. Trends are only trends. Many people like ice cream, but I’m sure the person who is lactose intolerant does not.</p>
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Perhaps there’s a reason they would rather pay high prices for consulting services. Perhaps they would hire consultants anyway, even if they did have graduates from top engineering schools. It’s difficult to debate this without a specific example in mind.</p>
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I also agree that readership is above average, but not skewed so much that we are to assume a significant percentage has the opportunity to take high paying finance positions, such as investment banking.</p>
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What if these companies cannot afford to offer such pay. Going back to the hiring of consultants… why are we assuming they would not hire consultants regardless? </p>
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When I graduated, I was offered a position at a company (while it wasn’t engineering, the idea is still the same) where they would have to spend some time training me. They required that I agree to stay for an absolute minimum of two years if I were to sign on, probably because they would be investing in me, and wouldn’t expect me to generate a profit when I first started.</p>
<p>Yet at the end of the day, because the trends are as clearly asymmetric as they are, much of the best engineering talent will continue to flow to finance and consulting but not vice versa. </p>
<p>But what you are saying points to a distinct opportunity. Certainly anybody who slashed through a top engineering major must enjoy engineering at some level, for otherwise they would have quit long ago. Hence, engineering firms don’t really need to match the salaries available in consulting or finance but merely need to approach them in order to attract top engineering talent. But they won’t do even that. </p>
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<p>Then let me give you an example. Google doesn’t engage management consultants (at least not lately, it’s possible that they did in the past). Coincidentally, or perhaps not, Google also prides itself on employing some of the best talent - both from engineering and business - in the world. </p>
<p>But again, if what you are saying is true, and companies might continue to hire high-priced consultants anyway, then that is all the more reason for the best students to not want to work as engineers, but rather become consultants (or financiers). From a purely economically rational standpoint, why choose to work in a profession where companies will pay less when you could instead choose a profession where companies will pay more? </p>
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<p>Actually, I think they do have significant opportunities to take high-paying finance (or consulting) positions. To be clear, many of them may not have such opportunities immediately upon graduation. They may need to enter graduate school - whether that be a grad engineering program or MBA - for those opportunities to present themselves. But those opportunities are available for such students. </p>
<p>I’ll give you a specific example. I know a guy who graduated from a decent, but far from ‘top-10’ engineering undergrad program. He then went to MIT for an engineering master’s program, but with the specific intention of not even working as an engineer at all, but rather simply to leverage MIT for its recruiting access to the consulting and finance recruiting resources that his undergrad program lacked. I can’t argue with success, as he is now indeed an investment banker. He played the game brilliantly. </p>
<p>Now, one might ask why he didn’t simply pursue a top-flight MBA program which would have provided him with a more straightforward pathway to a career in finance. The reasoning was simple: he didn’t have the work experience that top MBA programs desire and he was unwilling to procure it by working at the types of engineering jobs that were available to him. </p>
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<p>I find it ironic that companies will claim that they can’t afford to improve engineering pay…yet will continue to pay high prices for consulting services. Clearly they had the money for the latter. </p>
<p>That would be like somebody ‘supposedly’ on a diet who complains that he can’t lose weight…only to be eating a bag of chips every day.</p>
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<p>Would they? It is well understood that consulting demand is largely a discretionary purchase that fluctuates heavily with the health of the economy. That seems to demonstrate quite clearly that consulting services are not really necessary, for otherwise, why would they decline during downturns? Necessary purchases - like food - are something that you always need to buy no matter what the economic conditions may be. </p>
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<p>Yet compare that to the manner in which consulting firms are structured nowadays, where incoming analysts with zero experience nevertheless have heightened pay expectations. Surely we can all agree that consulting firms are not exactly characterized by low pay. That is, after all, one of the consulting industry’s major recruitment selling points. </p>
<p>The consulting industry is therefore built on a large base of inexperienced, but nevertheless highly paid analysts. From an aggregate labor cost perspective, I don’t see how that’s any more advantageous than just having many experienced, highly paid employees. Either way, the total labor costs will be high. </p>
<p>The same is even more glaringly true in finance - an industry notorious for some of the highest overall employee compensation rates, as a percentage of firm revenue, in the entire world, and that includes even the least experienced hires. Investment banks typically pay out 40%+ of their revenue to their employees. VC/PE and hedge funds pay out substantially higher fractions than that. Practically no other industry can say the same. </p>
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<p>Then again, frankly, that seems to speak to a problem with the structuration of your company’s human resource processes. Why exactly are consulting and finance firms able to derive instant value from their handsomely-paid new hires, the vast majority of whom will leave after a few years, yet engineering firms can’t do the same? More poignantly, why do many of those same engineering firms then engage those very same consulting firms, who just so happen to be staffed by those handsomely paid new hires? Those engineering firms are unable to derive net value from recent college graduates, but they can (or at least believe they can) derive net value from paying far higher fees to engage consulting firms who employ those very same recent college graduates, who are actually being paid more than if they had joined the engineering firm? What’s wrong with this picture? That highlights the fundamental irony at hand.</p>
<p>What only exacerbates the paradox is that you would think that engineering students from the top programs such as MIT or Stanford would be extraordinarily well trained as engineers. (If not, then perhaps they do not deserve to be top-ranked, but that’s another discussion entirely.) Hence, you would think that such students could add instant value by working as engineers. You say that they nevertheless cannot. Yet how is it that they seem to be able to add instant value as consultants or bankers - professions for which they did not study as undergrads and presumably would need a far greater ramp-up period? </p>
<p>If you continue to believe that the reasoning comes down to diploma branding, then see below. </p>
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<p>But if that is true, then that seems to open another possibility - engineering firms could hire the MIT and Stanford engineers and place them in highly paid sales-oriented roles, for example, by working as sales engineers where they could leverage the power of their brand to access clients.</p>
<p>I can anticipate the counterargument: that such a strategy will fail to increase revenue in a sales engineering role as clients will not be swayed to purchase engineering products simply by the college degree of the sales engineer. After all, engineering products are usually sold to other engineering firms for which the branding of the salesman should matter little. But that only highlights yet another irony. You yourself stated in your above quote that consulting firms are successfully leveraging the brand name of their employees’ schools to sell themselves to clients, which include numerous engineering firms. The very same engineering firms who are not be swayed by brands when purchasing engineering products are swayed when purchasing consulting products. Why is that? </p>
<p>Again, the fundamental paradox is that engineering firms for reasons still unclear are unable or unwilling to pay high salaries directly to engineers from top programs…but seem to have no problem paying them even higher salaries indirectly through the consulting or finance employment channel. Companies know (or should know) that when they purchase an engagement from a top consulting firm, they are actually paying for work (largely) conducted by recent top college graduates - the very same top graduates who they refused to provide higher salary offers to hire directly. That fundamental irony distorts the labor market for top college graduates and incentivizes people to choose counterintuitive and socially inefficient career choices. You would think that an MIT engineering graduate would be more effectively employed as an actual engineer, not as a consultant with an engineering clientele. Yet the latter will pay him better.</p>
<p>“Frankly, I don’t know why it is mentioned so much when 90% of the engineering grads cannot even get into the industry to begin with.”</p>
<p>There is one, and only one reason, as far as CC is concerned.</p>
<p>That reason is because one singular, sole indiividual, Sakky, and Sakky nearly alone, keeps bringing it up.</p>
<p>That is the only reason it keeps getting mentioned so much, on CC. It is rarely brought up on CC except by Sakky.</p>
<p>“…90% of the engineering grads cannot even get into the industry to begin with.”</p>
<p>I absolutely agree, actually probably more than 90%. And a large chunk wouldn’t be happy there, or be any good at it.</p>
<p>Moreover, the investment banks do not just poach engineers fom engineering jobs, they poach everyone from virtually all other jobs. The ones most often poached are liberal arts majors, from whatever the heck else they would be doing otherwise. The investment banks overpay vs. virtually every industry and job function, not just those industries or job functions related to engineering-related skills or engineers. This singular fixation on engineers specifically gives a different impression.</p>
<p>Perhaps this shows selection bias for people that attend heavily recruited engineering schools? I knew a number of people back at CMU that had no intention of ever doing any engineering with the degree, and was instead only doing it so they could get a finance related job. Likewise, I’ve met a number of PhDs here at Caltech that have “burnt out” and no longer want to do engineering, so I imagine to them a really well paying job is exactly what they’re looking for. Neither of these types of people have been poached from engineering disciplines, most of them have left on their own.</p>
<p>I generally don’t see investment bankers as successful people. They are generally fools who contribute nothing useful to society. Venture capitalists do in fact have the potential to contribute something useful to society by financing certain types of start-ups, but a virtue theorist would argue that their contribution is simply a positive externality of their selfish motives (in most cases, some venture capitalists may have ethical intentions but they likely wouldn’t last very long in the industry if they money wasn’t their sole motive).</p>
Then we agree. You have statistics that show the overall trends. However, for any given person, he or she may logically choose to work in engineering over finance.</p>
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<p>Just take a look at the government and the excessive pork barrel spending. In the meanwhile, we still don’t have enough funds for critical needs (whatever you believe those to be). Does it make sense in the grand scheme of things? No, but it happens for a variety of reasons.</p>
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I can only speak about my particular offer. It was for a project management position within a large construction management firm. My position would’ve dealt with managing trade contracts for MEPS contractors (mechanical, electrical, plumbing, sprinkler systems in building construction). My bachelor’s and master’s degrees were both in civil engineering and I had no prior work experience in MEPS, so I would’ve been a fish out of water. Clearly they would’ve had to spend a significant amount of time to train me to understand everything. I do not know what kind of training finance firms have for new employees. Perhaps it’s minimal and they would get their ROI much quicker and thus not worry about losing money on their investments (the new employees). That’s just me thinking out loud; perhaps you or onecircuit can enlighten me in this area.</p>
First, you cannot interpret the available evidence in this manner. You are comparing the choices of students to the choices of established professionals.</p>
<p>Most finance majors obviously cannot work in engineering. Therefore, we are talking about engineering graduates who choose to work in finance. This is a self-selected group. It is completely natural to expect that a graduate who chooses to significantly deviate from their educational background has a specific goal and will continue to pursue that goal.</p>
<p>Also, you concede that the primary benefit of a career in finance is the exit opportunities available after a few years of work. A professional who has already paid their dues in this process probably isn’t going to want to switch to a career they could have had straight out of undergrad. Again, they made their choice when they graduated and chose a finance career.
To me, this implies that engineering firms don’t consider the ROI from hiring “top” students worth the additional cost to attract said students. And this is a core problem with your usual argument. You have never explained the actual impact on society that might occur when “top” students choose finance over engineering. Unless you are prepared to contend that every single graduating engineer is offered employment in engineering, we can assume that the only impact is a slight reduction in the overall engineering pool in terms of school prestige. Engineering firms evidently don’t consider this reduction to be much of a problem.</p>
<p>In fact, we can extend this reasoning. You state that
Really, doesn’t this argue that the students recruited by McKinsey are not all that competent or capable? If anything, perhaps we are better off with Idaho State graduates manning our nuclear reactors.
See above! You concede that elite consulting firms are not providing especially high-quality products. I question whether an engineering firm would be successful if a significant proportion of the bridges it built fell down.
You have not done the necessary groundwork to make this argument at all. You must link the methodology of an engineering ranking to the ability of graduates to generate value as professional engineers.</p>
This is valid only if engineers like engineering more than any amount of money can change. In fact many engineers cease liking engineering, or like it but prefer a fatter paycheck (assuming that they can get one!). The first group CANNOT be attracted to an engineering job, and the second are not worth pursuing.</p>
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This is not uncommon at many “elite” universities - engineering is pursued not as a passion, but as a gateway to finance and management with an adequately lucrative fallback.</p>
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None of the companies for which I have ever worked have hired the type of consultants you describe. The only consultants I have seen were “graybeards” - experienced, usually retired professionals brought in to leverage their occasionally needed knowledge. Even if they did, the fact that they can overpay 5 guys for 6 months doesn’t mean that they can overpay 1000 guys every year.</p>
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You managed to miss my point entirely. I was saying that they got rid of them before they cost more money - at some point they want a promotion and a raise, and if you need 1000 highly-paid door-openers and 100 higher-paid closers then 90% or so are getting fired in favor of new hires.</p>
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This may come as a shock to you, but the expenses associated with different businesses vary wildly. Investment banks sell a highly-lucrative product with comparatively little non-human expenses - of COURSE they can afford to pay well!</p>
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They cannot because an engineering education extends far beyond college. Why can’t med school grads perform brain surgery? At least Harvard grads, or Johns Hopkins - they are the best, presumably THEY can walk out of the graduation ceremony and immediately start cutting into people!</p>
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Presumably because their “instant value” has nothing to do with an education they received! Does a football player’s starting salary depend on the degree they received? If entrance into the profession has nothing to do with prior experience or education, and is instantly profitable, then it must be dependent either on inherent characteristics of the individual or else on a unique character of the employment.</p>
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I don’t know any engineering firms using these consultants, so I’m guessing here, but you sell “management products” to people who are often non-engineers and “technical products” to engineers. We DO use engineers as technical salespeople… to sell to other engineers. We use MBA-types to sell programs to people who don’t know a Watt from an Ohm.</p>
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And I suspect that they are paying for work (or think they are) that is guaranteed by and supervised by experienced professionals. Or perhaps they are idiots who are driving their company into the ground. Or perhaps they are engaging in shady behavior and know that engaging such a “novice” consultant will give the appearance of propriety without the risk of discovery that would come with experienced advice.</p>
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They would be more effectively employed as engineer, just not more lucratively. Astonishing, isn’t it? I hear teachers and firefighters and police and soldiers and all KINDS of people get paid less than their contribution to society deserves. Tragedy.</p>
<p>Anyways, back to the topic that this thread is supposed to be about…</p>
<p>Being an engineering student myself, and in a wider sense a member of the “social masses” that the OP is referring to, i can genuinely say that I have never heard of any of those finace or management consulting firms, except for goldman sachs, and that was only because of some bad news about that company on the tv news. Not exactly a glowing endorsement. The teeming masses aren’t a very good judge of much, and what average Joe Schmoe has head of is not going to be representative of what reality actually is.</p>
<p>That being said, I think it’d be safe to say that most people have heard of companies that sell consumer electronics and software, along with the relevant services. These would be the Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc that make the news constantly. They will have heard of Boeing and possibly Airbus. They will have heard of NASA. That’s about all I expect, honestly. Of course they will have also heard names of other companies, but the main thing they will think of when they hear of the company is the sort of product that they make, or service that they provide.</p>
<p>To the first group, we then have to ask the question why they ceased liking engineering. Perhaps because it provided insufficient payoff for too much work? In that case, an increase in the payoff would indeed attract the first group.</p>
<p>As to the second group, you then have to ask why the consulting and finance industries seem not to mind attracting such mercenaries. Why are those industries allowed to pursue people who desire money, but not the engineering industry? </p>
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<p>But that doesn’t answer the core question: why can’t engineering be the first-choice career? Why does engineering have to be the ‘fallback’ (your words, not mine)? </p>
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<p>McKinsey, BCG, Bain, and the rest of the strategy consulting industy vanguard is clearly obtaining a highly lucrative clientele from somewhere. They are also precisely the firms who are (in)famous for hiring people right out of school. </p>
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<p>No, you missed my point entirely. Whether those firms eliminate a large fraction of new hires quickly, the inescapable point is that their overall labor costs are still high. Sure, it would be even higher if they didn’t exhibit such large workforce attrition, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that their overall labor costs are still outlandish. </p>
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<p>And this may come as a shock to you, but engineering firms also sell highly lucrative products with comparatively little non-human expenses - indeed, surely higher than most consulting and finance firms. Companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Intel, IBM, Oracle are swimming in cash. Yet they’re conspicuously not paying it out to their engineers. Heck, I strongly suspect that Microsoft or Intel each alone generates more annual income than does the entire strategy consulting industry combined. Yet the fact remains that, as a graduating engineer, you will make more working as a consultant than you would at Microsoft or (especially) Intel. </p>
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<p>Yet, like I said, isn’t it interesting that they can add instant ‘value’ as a consultant or banker. See below. </p>
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<p>And similarly, I am confident that engineering firms could leverage exactly the same characteristics of employment. For example, engineering firms, via their sales/marketing strategy, could say that their products/services were “designed” by MIT engineers. Again, see below. </p>
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<p>Those very same “engineering firms” are evidently headed by MBA management types who you deride, but will indeed hire consultants. Let’s face it: most engineering firms are run by non-engineers. That then raises the question of why such engineering firms are being run by these supposedly clueless managers in the first place (and why you, as an engineer, should want to work there). </p>
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<p>It could be any or all of those attributes, or none of them. It doesn’t matter. All that matters, at the end of the day, is that the consulting firms are indeed ‘reselling’ new college graduates at nosebleed markups to their clients. That then raises the question of why those very same clients don’t just simply hire those college graduates directly for a far cheaper price. </p>
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<p>Um, all of those cases are tragedies. Heck, I myself have discussed on CC that the most serious problem facing the US primary/secondary school system is that it cannot attract highly talented college graduates, but rather tends to attract the lower percentiles of college graduates. Contrast that with the educational systems in other countries such as Asia or Europe where the very best students are incentivized to become teachers. The same could be said for police and soldiers. </p>
<p>But you evidently not only do not seem to be interested in solving any of society’s ills, but you seem to want to actively hinder those who do. Engineering right now suffers from a inefficient brain-drain issue, where the best-educated engineering minds tend to leave engineering for other industries, and you seem to think that that’s exactly the way it ought to be. </p>
<p>Pity. I thought you, of all people, actually cared about the state of engineering in the country. I have actively proposed that engineers be paid better, and you want no part of that? {Hey, if you truly don’t want any extra pay, you can always send it to me. I’ll happily take it off your hands.}</p>
<p>Uh, no, we don’t agree, for the statistical trends are clear. By the same token, nobody can exactly predict how any particular individual will respond to taking up smoking, but the statistical trends linking smoking and poor health are clear enough to recommend that people should not smoke. </p>
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<p>But that doesn’t mean that we should simply settle for the status quo. For example, government does indeed waste boatloads of money, but that’s why we hold elections where we (sometimes) hold politicians accountable. We don’t simply throw up our hands and do nothing. </p>
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<p>And yet if that were indeed the case that finance firms are able to generate quick ROI with minimal training, then that begs the question of why they have to pay their employees so well anyway. After all, finance people apparently don’t need much training to do their jobs, right? It surely then seems as if the finance industry is the ideal industry for its employees: a high-paying industry that requires relatively little training. </p>
<p>But you would have to then wonder why the financial services firms themselves haven’t quite figured this out, and then simply reduced compensation accordingly, keeping the lion’s share of the profit for the upper-level managers and the shareholders. After all, most companies pay a pittance to entry-level employees who have little training and expertise. Why doesn’t the finance industry do the same? </p>
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<p>Uh, no, I’m quite sure that I can interpret the available evidence in exactly the manner I have described. See below. </p>
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<p>Why not? More specifically, why is it not any more outlandish than engineering majors who work in finance, which we agree happens routinely? After all, the finance *college major<a href=“which%20I%20had%20never%20brought%20up%20before,%20but%20I%20have%20no%20problem%20with%20bringing%20into%20the%20conversation”>/i</a> is highly mathematical and quantitative - indeed, arguably more quantitative than many engineering undergraduate programs. I don’t actually see, from a training standpoint, why hiring a finance undergraduate major into an engineering position would be impossible, particularly when engineers today are currently hired into positions that are not highly related to their specific engineering disciplines. {For example, I can think of several mechanical engineers who were hired into software positions, and a chemical engineer who took a job at a computer hardware design firm.} </p>
<p>More importantly, why couldn’t a finance undergraduate major enter engineering graduate school to switch careers to become an engineer, in the same manner that many engineers enter MBA programs to become financiers? After all, like I said, the finance undergrad surely has the quantitative background to be eligible for engineering grad school. {You may not even need such a quant background anyway - I know a girl who majored in English and then later earned a master’s in engineering at MIT.} </p>
<p>But the fact remains, few if any financiers, whether they actually majored in finance as undergrads or not, would contemplate switching careers to engineering. But plenty of engineers can and do switch careers to finance, either right out of undergrad, or post-MBA. </p>
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<p>Uh, no, that then simply highlights the key question: why can’t engineering have comparable exit opportunities? People would then perhaps trudge through a few years of engineering work experience to secure the benefits of the strong exit opportunities. </p>
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<p>No, I have clearly done all of the groundwork that I needed, for the argument is simple. All I have to do is point to the rankings - we can surely agree that schools such as MIT and Stanford have dominated the engineering rankings ever since such rankings have existed. Like it or not, because of those rankings, the best prospective engineering students in the world are disproportionately attracted to those schools. Like it or not, those schools also tend to attract the best engineering faculty. {Case in point, a superstar newly minted engineering PhD with an academic tenure-track job offers at Idaho State and MIT is probably going to choose the latter.} Like it or not, those schools tend to attract the most engineering research funding, and they tend to attract the most prestigious engineering recruiters. </p>
<p>Yet it is also precisely schools such as MIT and Stanford where many of the engineering students choose not to actually take jobs as engineers. Hence, the very best engineering resources and opportunities that are provided to them are being wasted. </p>
<p>Now, again, if you want to argue that MIT and Stanford do not actually deserve top engineering rankings, then I invite you to lay the groundwork to support that argument. But even if you did, I suspect the argument would be irrelevant. After all, engineering recruiters think that they are the best engineering schools. Academia thinks the same. The best high school senior applicants who are interested in engineering think the same. As long as everybody thinks they are the best engineering schools, then they will continue to dominate the lions share of engineering educational resources in the world - and that is a clear waste of societal resources, if students in those schools don’t actually want to be engineers. Those resources would surely be more efficiently allocated to those students who are actually going to work as engineers. </p>
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<p>So why does McKinsey continue to be hired? Doesn’t that imply that the firms who actually hire McKinsey, which includes plenty of engineering firms, are not all that competent or capable? </p>
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<p>See above! However shoddy the quality of the service provided by these consulting firms, they continue to generate large fees from their clientele. Clearly their clientele thinks that they provide value, however misguided that may be. Why? </p>
<p>If clients were to stop engaging consulting (and finance) firms, then the entire problem would solve itself. Consulting and finance firms would then not have the resources to pay high salaries to new graduates, and then engineering students would then surely choose to actually work as engineers.</p>
<p>But, like I said, as long as those consulting and finance firms continue to be hired - often times by the very same engineering firms who refuse to raise salaries for their own engineers, ironically because they cannot afford to after paying the consultants and financiers - then new engineering graduates will continue to be tempted away from engineering.</p>
<p>Even if that was true, so what? You have a problem with that? There are particular topics that interest me, just as I am sure there are particular topics that interest you. I don’t bother you when you discuss those topics that interest you. If you don’t enjoy a particular topic of discussion that interests me, fair enough, don’t participate. Nobody is holding a gun to your head. </p>
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<p>Well, this is the engineering forum of CC. Surely you would not expect to come to this forum to discuss what the art history majors are doing. </p>
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<p>Let me put it to you this way. 90+% of engineering grads will never garner jobs at Google, Apple, Facebook, or other ‘high-prestige’ engineering firms. But we readily discuss possible pathways towards obtaining job offers at those firms. 90+% of all high school seniors will are interested in engineering will never attend schools of the caliber of MIT, Stanford, Caltech, or the like, yet we readily discuss them. Heck, right now on the very front page of the engineering forum is a thread entitled “Caltech vs. Stanford”. </p>
<p>I don’t see why discussing high-prestige engineering employers or schools that are unavailable to the majority of engineers is any different from discussing finance or consulting jobs that are also similarly unavailable to the majority of engineers.</p>
<p>sakky, take your intellect and writing ability and put it to something more useful, the argument has become fruitless. I do understand though; I have an obsessive personality type as well.</p>
<p>why does it always turn into engineers going into finance, who cares about these individuals. If this minority of engineers wishes to go into finance then so be it. From what ive gathered from engineers ive talked too is that experience is more important then what school you went too. However i do understand its different in the states (prestige means more), yet regardless once your engineer, from an accredited program, your engineer right? So why is it so distressing to you sakky that MIT students pursue finance?</p>
<p>There is nothing wrong with discussing prestige. It is just that prestige is VERY subjective. What makes an engineer working at Goldman & Sachs more “prestigious” than an engineer at NASA?</p>
<p>What makes a engineering student creating “derivatives” (play on words) for some hedge-fund company more “prestigious” than and aerospace engineer calculating “derivatives” to support the military aircrafts?</p>
<p>As most of you know…derivatives are different things is each scenario.</p>