<p>carnelian, why, exactly, would the economy affect the number of applicants? The only reason it allows employers to be more selective is that they can’t afford to hire as many people so they are forced to be more selective than they otherwise would be.</p>
<p>I suppose you could argue that there are more people applying simply because there are a lot of workers that lost their jobs that are also applying, but that is a relatively small number compared to the total number of engineers and is offset by the fact that a lot of recent grads are doing grad school instead of getting jobs because of the economy.</p>