The counterintuitive side of engineering

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>One other thing to note is that CPSLO has a lot of civil engineering and business graduates (and amazingly good job placement for the civil engineering graduates even in 2009). UCB has a lot of biology (popular pre-med) and political science (popular pre-law) graduates (obviously, those looking for jobs are the ones who did not go to medical or law school). Psychology is also popular at UCB.</p>

<p>Perhaps there is a hint about the type of student who goes to each school. Not so much in terms of academic strength or record in high school or community college, but as to their purpose in school, in terms of how focused they are on job and career prospects at the bachelor’s degree level.</p>

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<p>Wow, this is a ridiculous thread. A quick review of the data shows just how wrong the OP is.</p>

<p>Anywhere from 0-6 months after graduation 13.3% of UC berkeley’s engineering graduates were still seeking employment in 2010. Although SLO doesn’t have info for engineering specifically, they do state in their report that around the 6 month mark 18% of the college’s graduates were still seeking employment. However, no conclusions can be drawn from comparing these two sets of data because the two sets of data are seriously flawed.</p>

<ol>
<li><p>These are both self-response surveys. Self-response surveys have very limited use in the real world.</p></li>
<li><p>There is no way to know exactly when the surveys (conducted through e-mail, snail mail, and phone calls) were responded to. If the response time for Berkeley’s graduates was an average of 3 months and the response time for SLO’s graduates was an average of 6 months, then SLO’s info would look much more favorable because the 3-6 month range is a time when many graduates find jobs. However, this data is not available, which really makes the entire comparison the OP is attempting close to worthless.</p></li>
<li><p>UC berkely’s data is based on information reported up to 6 months after graduate, while Cal Poly slo’s information is based on data from up to 1 year after graduation. </p></li>
<li><p>Cal Poly has a much higher response rate. There is simply no way to know what the Berkeley’s graduates who didn’t respond (which happens to be the majority of them) are doing after graduation, although it is reasonable to assume that an employed person has less time and energy to respond to a survey than an unemployed person does.</p></li>
</ol>

<p>There are many more problems with trying to compare the two data and it would be easy to pick out pockets of data here and there that make it look like Berkeley has the better career placement. The reality is that no conclusions should be drawn from the two data sets because they are simply not comparable.</p>

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<p>Also, saying that business majors have better career prospects than engineering majors based on the higher placement rates is similarly ridiculous. It ignores the fact that the majority of business majors at these two schools go on to work at the Big 4 and large consulting firms, who have a very strict and orderly recruiting process in which the business graduates are employed precisely at graduation. Engineering graduates’ employers are much more varied and they end up much more frequently at start-ups and mid-sized companies which do not have the same kind of recruiting process. </p>

<p>A more rational thing to do would be to simply look up the BLS’s detailed unemployment rates (which are based on random sampling and are therefore legitimate data sets) that happen to show that the employment rates for business related fields and engineering fields are roughly on par with each other.</p>

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<p>I think ucbalumnus did an admirable job crunching through the data to provide a fair and objective discussion. I applaud you for it!</p>

<p>I think we can safely infer from this discussion is that not going to engineering school and signing up for on-line business school might not be the wisest career choice.</p>

<p>We can also infer that Cal Poly’s graduates are not the purported CSU underachievers that will desperately settle for any old sub-par jobs due to their utterly low career expectations, as was inferred by Johanne1430.</p>

<p>Some people just reek of self-righteous condescension.</p>

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<p>So ~20% of UCB civil engineering grads are employed, and ~40% go to grad school. What happens to the other 40%? Are they forced to take menial jobs that any high school grad can do? Do they get a second bachelors in a different field? Do they start their own businesses? And if they do take minimum wage jobs, do they have a hope of getting a civil engineering job when the construction industry recovers? It would be a shame to throw away all that time and money spent on that degree if they are passed over in favor of more recent grads.</p>

<p>Finally, what happens to those students who go straight to grad school without work experience? It would seem that you’re in the position where you’d be overqualified for entry level jobs but don’t have enough experience to take the higher level jobs.</p>

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<p>Having a masters in civil engineering does not make one overqualified for entry-level positions. When I was looking for internships when I was in school, I spoke with some structural engineering firms and many would not hire someone for an entry-level position without a masters degree. This is becoming more and more common.</p>

<p>If you don’t get a job in your field, then you look for a job elsewhere. I came across a LinkedIn profile the other day of a recent grad with a chemical engineering degree who is now apparently working part-time jobs as a legal intern and a pharmacy technician. I knew someone who had an electrical engineering degree and ended up with a career as a construction inspector because he graduated when the dot com bubble burst. It’s not fair for everyone; sometimes it just comes down to luck.</p>

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<p>I don’t know if I have ever seen the word “rape” thrown around so loosely in what is supposed to be a serious thread.</p>

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<p>I might have missed it earlier in the thread, but did anyone have the stats for percentage of CSU students going to grad school? I know in my experience, the top students in classes tend to go to grad school (not 100%, but for the most part true), so that might mean you wind up sampling more the lower part of Berkeley (the people you see posting on CC about their 2.8) while the Cal Poly schools have more representation in their employment from top students.</p>

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<p>Cal Poly SLO’s survey does include master’s degree graduates in some majors (listed separately from bachelor’s degree graduates). You can compare the effect of a master’s degree versus a bachelor’s degree in these cases, within the limitation of the survey (based on self-response, etc.). Of course, it does not say whether the master’s degree graduate studied to the master’s degree immediately after the bachelor’s degree, or with some amount of work experience between finishing a bachelor’s degree and starting master’s degree study, so the comparison may not be a straightforward one for someone asking “will getting a master’s degree right after my bachelor’s degree help my job and career prospects?”.</p>

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<p>The CPSLO and UCB career surveys do list percentages going to graduate school for each major. It may be harder to find such information for all CSUs or UCs since most do not have anything like these career surveys where one can look at them.</p>

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<p>

I don’t have statistics and don’t know anyone in UCB, but I do have some stories:</p>

<p>Friend 1 went to UCLA, majored in civil engineering, and graduated last year. He has a 3.3 GPA and has could not find any engineering work despite sending out nearly a hundred resumes and applications. He only got two interviews, and he is now applying to grad school because he hopes the construction market will make a comeback by 2013.</p>

<p>Friend 2 went to USC and majored in chemical engineering. I don’t know his GPA, but he did send out resumes to a dozen or so engineering companies without getting a response. Shortly after graduation, he applied to non-engineering companies and soon received a few job offers. He is now working in the financial industry.</p>

<p>Friend 3 went to Cal Poly Pomona, majored in civil engineering, and got a 3.1 GPA. She only turned in resumes to a few places (including the career center) because she intended to take a few months off to relax after graduation before entering the workforce. A month after graduation, her vacation ended when she received a call that turned out to be a phone interview. A week after that, she was hired.</p>

<p>Unfortunately, I don’t know anyone in the Cal State system (Cal State LA, Cal State Long Beach, etc) who majored in engineering.</p>

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<p>

Obviously it varies from school to school, but this has not been the case from what I’ve observed. The top engineering students (3.7+ GPA) usually get good non-engineering positions like I-banking (they are also offered engineering jobs, but choose not to take them). Everyone else tries to get an engineering job, and those who fail to get jobs but have decent grades go to grad school as a last resort.</p>

<p>There are plenty of grad students who have good grades and are employed, but the difference is that they didn’t go to grad school right away. Instead they finished undergrad, worked for a couple of years, and then went to grad school in the hopes of getting a raise and/or promotion.</p>

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<p>The Cal Polys (SLO and Pomona) are part of the California State University system.</p>

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<p>I don’t know much about California schools but I have read a bit about UCs and CSUs.</p>

<p>I am actually shocked that Cal Poly has the highest starting salary for all CA public universities. I would have assumed it would have been Cal. </p>

<p>So I am very impressed that Cal Poly can REALLY hold its own, in terms of career placements and starting salary, even when compared to Cal.</p>

<p>So I want to know how does Cal Poly’s reputation stack up against other UCs in general?</p>

<p>I have read repeatedly here on CC that people from even mid-tier UCs dump on Cal Poly because it is a CSU. So are there any credence to those comments? </p>

<p>Or is that just your classic make others look bad so you can look better?</p>

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<p>Major by major, CPSLO starting pay for bachelor’s degree graduates is generally lower than for UCB bachelor’s degree graduates, but job placement rates are higher (see some comparisons a few posts up).</p>

<p>However, CPSLO students tend to favor majors with better job and career prospects (engineering and business) far more than UCB students do, which makes the overall pay levels for CPSLO bachelor’s degree graduates higher than for UCB bachelor’s degree graduates. (Of course, if you count the unemployed as earning $0 and average that in, then the comparison becomes more advantageous for CPSLO both on a major by major basis and overall due to higher job placement rates.)</p>

<p>Warning: speculation ahead.</p>

<p>It is possible that differences in student attitudes toward purpose in school may have something to do with it. UCB seemed to have a lot of the following types of students:</p>

<ul>
<li><p>“Academic idealists” who ignore job and career prospects of various majors or course selections, perhaps buying into the idea that they just need to get a degree from a good university and a good job will be waiting. That may have been more true several decades ago, but not so much now.</p></li>
<li><p>Students narrowly targeting graduate or professional school, including medical and law school. Such students often select majors and courses that preclude a “plan B” if they do not get into graduate or professional school. Molecular and Cell Biology is the most popular major at UCB, for example. If GPA gamesmanship for medical and law school leads a student to select “easy A” courses, s/he may end up learning less than average, which can be a major problem if s/he does not get into medical or law school. Those seeking graduate school in an academic field may not be visiting the career center early enough to get the best opportunities, at least as a backup option; if they do not get into graduate school, or do not attend for whatever reason, they may then be starting the job search too late, with diminished prospects.</p></li>
<li><p>Smart but lazy students. Unfortunately for them, laziness often leads to course and major selection that is not helpful for post-graduation job and career prospects, and grades too low for graduate or professional school.</p></li>
</ul>

<p>On the other hand, the heavy bias by CPSLO students to “preprofessional majors” (engineering and business) may reflect a greater tendency to have a job and career motivation and purpose for being in school. Such students may be more likely to do job and career oriented things, like more aggressively seek out internship jobs and visit the career center at an early stage as graduation approaches.</p>

<p>Would anyone here have any more insight as to whether such speculation is actually the case, or if there is something else completely different going on?</p>

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<p>Uh, no it’s not. At least, not to *start<a href=“although%20it%20may%20perhaps%20be%20true%20later%20in%20their%20careers”>/i</a>.</p>

<p>For example, in 2007, at the height of the economic boom, Harvard male graduates made a median salary of ~$60k, whereas female graduates made $50k. In contrast the average salary coming out of MIT, averaged over both genders, was about $62k. (Yes, averages and medians are not entirely comparable, but the bottom line is that there is no evidence that MIT graduates made less than Harvard graduates in terms of starting salary.) </p>

<p>[?07</a> Men Make More | News | The Harvard Crimson](<a href=“http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/6/6/07-men-make-more-male-harvard/]?07”>’07 Men Make More | News | The Harvard Crimson)</p>

<p><a href=“http://web.mit.edu/career/www/infostats/graduation07.pdf[/url]”>http://web.mit.edu/career/www/infostats/graduation07.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>The explanation seems to be obvious - MIT graduates plenty of high-paid tech-oriented students, whereas Harvard, for all its investment banking and consulting prowess, nevertheless still graduates many low-paying humanities majors. Granted, many of them take low-paying jobs by choice - i.e., if you’re a trust fund millionaire, you probably feel no compunction to take the highest paying job you can find - but that doesn’t detract from the core issue that the average/median Harvard graduate is not as well paid as the average/median MIT graduate.</p>

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<p>Exactly right, and that’s a point that I’ve been driving home in several of my other posts. With the notable exception of CS/software, graduating from a “top”-ranked engineering program seems to confer little salary boost over graduating from a lesser-ranked engineering program if you actually choose to work as an engineer. You may be able to obtain employment at a more “prestigious” engineering employer, or (especially at the very top programs) find top non-employment in non-engineering fields such as the aforementioned investment banking and consulting fields, but that doesn’t translate into significantly higher engineering starting salaries.</p>

<p>On the other hand, see below. </p>

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<p>Well, I’m not quite sure that I can agree with that, as people don’t agree on what it means to be ‘top’ or ‘subpar’. For example, plenty of graduates from the top schools including Berkeley choose to join or found their own startups which often times pay conspicuously low starting salaries - and indeed, sometimes no salaries at all especially if you’re a founder - but have tremendous potential. Similarly, plenty of graduates take jobs that may not pay particularly well, at least to start, but open the door to significant other career opportunities that they want. For example, I can think of plenty of graduates of top schools who took jobs as relatively low-paying research associates because they wanted to eventually enter academia and wanted to build their research credentials to enter top PhD programs. Many of them did indeed enter and complete such programs and are now tenure-track faculty.</p>

<p>The bottom line is that not everybody wants the highest possible pay. {And if you do, then you shouldn’t take a job in engineering at all, but rather head for Wall Street.}</p>

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Interesting. Does the masters have a thesis requirement, or is it just a few extra classes?</p>

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<p>Some programs do, some don’t.</p>

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The grads from the top UC schools lack practical job skills and/or are overconfident. Instead of learning practical knowledge (like choosing an appropriate shoring method for construction), they spend time doing theoretical stuff like deriving the finite element method. Many of them are thinking that if they can do all the hard theory, finding work will be a piece of cake since they know so much more (and/or are smarter) than the competition. As a result, they start looking for jobs much later than Cal Poly grads.</p>

<p>On the other hand, the Cal Poly system pushes students into employment. A lot of their work is practical knowledge that is used in the field. Many of their projects involve going to construction sites, factories, etc, where they not only see how things are done in the field but also get the contact info of project managers and engineers. This expands their network and increases the places where they can look for work.</p>

<p>Herd mentality and psychology may also play a role. If you go to the top UC schools and notice that very few of your classmates are finding jobs, you may be thinking “Man, I can’t get anything because the economy sucks. Maybe I’ll go to grad school like what my other friends are doing.” However, a Cal Poly grad who sees that many fellow classmates already have a job lined up may be more motivated and confident. He/she will be thinking “If my classmates are all finding jobs, why can’t I?” and will look even harder for one.</p>

<p>Finally, wealth and demographics may also be a factor. On average, top UC students come from richer families who can afford that extra tuition. They’re more likely to have parents that can support them while waiting for that “dream job” or while going to grad school. Cal Poly students, on the other hand, mostly come from working-class families who can’t support them for long. They know that they need money for tuition and to support themselves and/or their families, so they try every possible way to find internships and jobs.</p>

<p>Disclaimer: I don’t know anyone in UCB’s engineering school, and I’ve never been anywhere near that campus. Although I know a few students from the UC and Cal Poly schools, what I’ve just said is a best guess and may be far from the truth.</p>