According to a survery conducted in 2019 by the Student Affairs Information & Research Office, about 28% of the recent MAE (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering) graduates were still seeking employment coming out of UCLA. Why is this?
Asking because I am deciding between UCLA, GT, and UT. Both GT and UT have much higher job or master placements.
@Luke1047 . . . they probably do have higher placements into jobs obtained before graduation, because they both do have top-tier rankings. I’ll tag @10s4life and see if he could present this to someone in engineering. And when I get a chance, I’ll do a little research; it may be a few days though.
Edit: I did note the 2019 survey of MAE graduates being 28% w/o employment, but if you can link GT’s and UT’s, I’d like to see them. Thank you.
That number is skewed, because the survey only has a 33% response rate. The vast majority of MAE friends I know all interned at least once and signed job offers in the fall of their senior year. That’s the same for most engineers here. Most don’t fill out surveys the university sends. It’s similar to yelp reviews, usually it’s people complaining that will things out so the percentages are skewed.
@firmament2x here is the data for GT according to a 2016 survey. It says that 78.3% had jobs after graduation while 20.5% went on to pursue masters. I understand that there can be some overlap but it is most likely minimal.
https://academiceffectiveness.gatech.edu/category/surveys/commencement-survey/
Here is data for UT. They claim that 91% of their undergraduates have post graduate plans.
http://www.engr.utexas.edu/images/pdfs/ECAC-Our-Impact-Infographic.pdf
@Luke1047 . . . sorry for being tardy in response as I hadn’t had a lot of days to work on this lately. I’ll have to divide this post into Part I and Part II.
Part I
From the latest American Society of Engineering Education (“ASEE”) figures from 2018, these were the degrees awarded by the three universities:
Major(s)………………Georgia Tech…………UT Austin…………………UCLA
Mechanical E………………499…………………………286……………………….137*
Other E Majors……………842………………………….554…………….…………424
Computer Science……750……………………….…425……………………….257
Total E/CS………………2,091.…………….………….1,265………………….……818
*Since UCLA groups Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering together (“M&AE”) for its outcome surveys, there were 38 AE graduates added to the 137 ME grads totaling 175 M&AE graduates in 2018. I’ll work on this data a little later.
Here are the links to each university’s ASEE outcome and Program Comparison data, if it did generate the latter data set, for average years to degree (“YTD”) data:
Georgia Tech:
http://profiles.asee.org/profiles/8138/screen/21 Degrees awarded in E/CS. –GT1–
http://profiles.asee.org/profiles/8138/screen/23?School_name=Georgia+Institute+of+Technology – GT2 – YTD data
UT Austin:
http://profiles.asee.org/profiles/8090/screen/21 Degrees awarded in E/CS. --UT1–
http://profiles.asee.org/profiles/8090/screen/23?school_name=The+University+of+Texas+at+Austin --UT2–
UCLA:
http://profiles.asee.org/profiles/8219/screen/21?school_name=University+of+California%2C+Los+Angeles --UCLA1–
http://profiles.asee.org/profiles/8219/screen/23 YTD for each E major. --UCLA2–
In UCLA2, the University actually calculated YTD for each E/CS major, which I will use below to see if there is a correlation between YTD for the E/CS majors and the percentage of students in each searching for employment.
I want to also see if GT, which we know is mainly a tech-degree granting university would reflect a longer time to graduate. Here’s how each university did in YTD for all majors at four and five years according to the 2019 CDS reports of each:
Cummulative Years to Degree………Georgia Tech………UT Austin…………….UCLA
Total Fr. Cohort of 2013………………………2,674…………………….8,034……………….…5,697
Cumm. Yrs to Grad., 4 Years………………1,221, 45.7%…4,892, 60.1%…4,529, 79.5%*
Cumm. Yrs to Grad., 5 Years……………2,275, 85.0%…6,385, 79.4%…5,121, 89.9%
*UCLA also had a good-sized cohort of transfers who’d taken degrees which were not figured into the above. They took on average a bit more than two years to graduate for the cohort as a whole, but if they majored in E/CS, they’d be closer to a full three years spent at UCLA which would closely mirror entering freshmen spending closer to five years at the University. And adding them to the freshmen cohort of 2013 would bring them closer to UT’s graduating classes because neither GT nor UT take as many transfers as UCLA.
It is evident that GT graduates do tend to need additional time in YTD and almost half do stay for 4.5 or 5.0 years, which matched their second link above, labeled GT2, which showed each of the E/CS majors having an average of 4.5 to YTD. UT didn’t compute this figure in its second link, UT2. We can’t really conclude anything for UT and UCLA E/CS majors in relation to GT’s because both offer numerous other non-E/CS BA degrees compared to GT.
The difference between GT and UT and UCLA is that the latter is on the quarter system. This actually makes things harder for UCLA E/CS majors to perfectly stick a four-year graduation landing as more could go wrong because UCLA students do take more courses ~ 45 in relation to the other two. This could be a factor in UCLA E/CS majors seeking employment at graduation because the last term ends in June.
Part II
Here are the links to outcome data and some selective quotes.
For Georgia Tech, 2018:
https://academiceffectiveness.gatech.edu/category/surveys/commencement-survey/ --GT3–
For University of Texas, Austin:
http://www.engr.utexas.edu/images/pdfs/ECAC-Our-Impact-Infographic.pdf --UT3–
Here are some things noted in the link:
For UCLA, here is a link and some data from the 2018-2019 academic year:
https://www.sairo.ucla.edu/First-Destination-Survey-Data Outcome data UCLA – UCLA3 –
Using the UCLA-1 and UCLA-2 links above, with the E/CS majors broken down further, we have the following for the University:
Major………………………YTD…………………No. of Degrees
Aerospace E……………4.19……………………….38
Bioengineering…….4.06……………………….51
Chemical E………………4.18……………………….82
Civil E…………………………4.18……………………….71
Computer E…………….4.18…………………………0 (New degree, no graduating cohort in 2018)
Computer Science…4.11……………….……215
CS & E………………………4.18……………………….42
Electrical E………………4.23……………………154
Materials E………………4.21…………………….…28
Mechanical E…………4.30…………………….137
And since UCLA is on the quarter system, it looks like the calculation for these E/CS majors would be in trimesters not quarters (without figuring in the summer quarter term): e.g., the ME majors look to have taken four years and almost one trimester to graduate, which could be the summer term following graduation. Every other E/CS major would have taken less than one additional term on average, which is somewhat of an advantage within the quarter/trimester system, but probably not for seeking employment.
The adjusted YTDs for UCLA’s E/CS three combined groupings, A&ME, E&CE, and CS&CSE (based on degrees-awarded averages), along with the five stand-alone majors’ YTDs were as follows along with “E,” being employed at graduation, “SE” as seeking employment at graduation, and “GS” enrolled or accepted to graduate school:
Major………………………YTD………GS ……E………SE
BioE…………………………4.06….0.49…0.30…0.08
ChemE……………….…4.18……0.19…0.36….0.35
CivilE………………………4.18……0.40…0.40…0.13
CS&CSE……….………….4.12….0.16…0.68…0.10
E&CE………………………4.23…0.20…0.39…0.27
MaterialsE………….…4.21…0.39…0.56….0.06
M&AE…………………….4.28….0.19…0.44…0.28
I actually tried to adjust the YTD and SE numbers by removing the ones who went to GS and then calculating the correlation to see if there was a direct relationship between YTD and SE, but there just weren’t enough data inputs to be able to do this.
But it is evident that besides 10s4life’s point that the job survey by UCLA is extremely passive and would tend to draw a larger portion of those who do seek jobs in addition to there being a fairly low response rate, there is a seeming relationship between YTD and SE.
The BioE majors graduate the quickest with a low YTD at 4.06 and a low SE at 8%.
The E&CE along with the M&AE groupings do similarly have a high YTD, 4.23 and 4.30, and do have a high SE at 27% and 28%.
The ChemEs tend to do the worst in employment, even in the prior years 2017 and 2018, so I don’t know why their 4.18 YTD is matched with a higher SE rate at 35%. Because its similar chemistry-based E major, Materials E, has good employment and good grad prospects, at least in comparison.
Per what you stated, GT, in its 2018 job survey, had 21.7% BS graduates (more encompassing than just E/CS) who were seeking jobs at the point of graduation because it stated that 79.3% of “job-seeking graduates” found them. UT seemed to slough over that stat and stated that 83% of E/CS grads had found jobs and 17% enrolled in grad school, presenting things in more glowing terms. Additionally, I’d like to see the breakdown of the 91% a bit more to validate it.
Wrt UCLA’s job prospect data, it’s a little too passive and too clinical. They need to break out the data as to why three E majors/groupings have high SE percentages. I think what would be found is that besides it being a conduit for complaints like Yelp in addition to a fairly low response rate – which of course exaggerates the SE data, that there is an offset for those who graduate and are able to enter the employment/grad-school picture, because E&CE majors should be snapped up pretty quickly, all other things being equal. The quarter system does also delay one’s entering the job market by graduating in June, and if things go awry as far as completing an estimated time for degree, then that E/CS student could have to come back beyond summer and extend into fall quarter of the following year, in addition to seeking employment beyond the summer months. In addition the UCLA survey did cut things off at spring of 2019, which could mean that those who took the survey for 2019 possibly graduated in 2018 or they would have had to have estimated a point a graduation with much greater amounts of guessing if they did graduate in 2019.
So it’s undoubtedly what 10s4life stated about the survey being oversaturated with those seeking jobs along with the low response rate, added to the problems with the quarter system of late graduations, the high number of courses, and being able to estimate one’s graduation point, etc.
Btw, I’m not here to try to convince you or anyone else to attend UCLA. But I did want to address the points you made because they were valid. Hopefully UCLA will work on improving its outcome data in the future. Sorry, again, for the late response.