<p>Every single point made in this thread is moot. </p>
<p>Let me explain why.</p>
<p>Life is forever changing. There are things that will happen that you can never predict. You can have everything mapped out perfectly and I can guarantee you that they won’t go that way. </p>
<p>In the end, it is people that make money, not majors.
And its not just people. Its people with ideas. And its not even just that.
Its people with ideas that are willing to act on those ideas. </p>
<p>You can graduate with a 200.000 GPA from the #1 school in the world and that would prove nothing. </p>
<p>Jim Carry was homeless and lived in a car at one point.
Richard Branson never went to college and started off with just a few dollars.
Ebay and Google were started in basements and garages. </p>
<p>Life will give you many opportunities. Learn to recognize them and take advantage of them. This statement alone is probably more valuable than every other post in this thread combined. Meaningless arguments over pointless statistics and stereotypes of majors do nothing and mean nothing.</p>
<p>Saying that the sun will come up tomorrow is indeed a prediction based on past events/statistics, but like you said, no prediction is a guarantee. So should I just take it all off right now and go streaking through the hallways? Might as well, since there’s no way to know if the sun will come up tomorrow or not.</p>
<p>Like it or not, we human beings must plan for the future, and it’s extremely important that the information we use to make those decisions is accurate and meaningful.</p>
<p>You oversimplified the point I made and you know it. You knew exactly what I was trying to say and so your sun example is moot. </p>
<p>Having a plan is certainly important, I agree. But analyzing MAJORS to the extent that people have done in this thread is, for all intents and purposes, pointless and unmeaningful in the long run.</p>
<p>I hear what you are saying but this is the United States of America. There are 300 million other folks with ideas and will act on those initial ideas…and most will have to resort to Plan B, C, D…Z. Therefore, there is no harm in trying to map out some “higher probability plans” in case other plans do not work.</p>
<p>Hell, I wanted to be a pure mathematician. It did not work out that way and thankfully I happened to roll the dice and take a set of CS courses that “I thought” would help as a Plan B. It worked out good but still was not my INITIAL idea.</p>
<p>Too much competition in this country. One has to plan some.</p>
<p>No, actually, it was you who asserted that it would be difficult to find even one accounting professor who had an engineering undergrad degree. Since that was your assertion, I believe that it’s your job to support it, not mine. </p>
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<p>Uh, sure it is. For the question that GT must then answer is how exactly should somebody go about obtaining an engineering job at Boeing (or similar overtime-paying defense contractor)? What are the actionable but non-obvious steps one would have to take to do that? </p>
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<p>But GT’s a software engineer. And he has already been criticized on other posts for making statements that, frankly, apply only to the software industry. </p>
<p>But even if we were to restrict ourselves purely to the software industry as GT seems to be doing, it is entirely apropos to point out that many software firms have their engineers work overtime without extra pay. Software is no panacea in this respect. </p>
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<p>And I believe your BLS analysis would also concur that finance/consulting jobs also pay substantially more than do engineering jobs. </p>
<p>But to your point, I have always agreed that if you are satisfied with a simple, standard, middle-class lifestyle, an engineering career can suit you well. But what if you want more than that? And I think we can agree that most students at top schools, or even students at the average schools but who are achieving top grades, are likely not satisfied with just an average lifestyle. </p>
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<p>No, I don’t think I need to prove that at all. I simply have to demonstrate that students at the top-ranked engineering schools, such as MIT and Stanford, are disproportionately likely to not work as engineers. And furthermore, those students who obtain high engineering grades are likewise disproportionately unlikely to work as engineers.</p>
<p>Two possibilities then exist. Either we agree that high rankings and grades indeed conform to ‘engineering value-add to society’, in which case the proof is clear. Or, rankings and grades do not conform to such value-add. </p>
<p>But if the latter is the case, then that is clearly a problem with the informativeness of those rankings and grades. If MIT and Stanford, being the two most “prestigious” engineering schools in the world, do not actually provide a disproportionate level of value-add to the state of engineering in the world, then we should not consider them to be prestigious engineering schools. But the fact that they do possess such prestige is surely a problem for society as a whole, because students and employers think they have such value, however deluded they may be. What that means is that the best prospective engineering students should not prefer to attend MIT or Stanford, and the fact that they do indicates that they are wasting their time when they would have been better off elsewhere. Similarly, the many top engineering firms who do recruit at MIT and Stanford are similarly wasting their resources. </p>
<p>Either way, we have a clear loss of value to society. Either the rankings are accurate and so “top” (in terms of value-add) engineering students are indeed being lost from engineering, or only those students who the world thinks are “top” engineering students are being lost, yet the world is losing value through by believing in a mirage.</p>
<p>Here on CC, we see repeatedly an interest amongst many readers regarding how they can be admitted to a “top-ranked” engineering school. In contrast, there aren’t exactly a whole lot of threads asking how one can win admission to the engineering program at Idaho State. But if the top engineering programs do not actually provide greater engineering value-add, then the effort of those students in being admitted to those schools is being wasted. </p>
<p>The same applies to grades. Why study hard to earn top engineering grades if such studying does not actually correlate with greater engineering value-add to society? Yet surely we can all agree that engineering students with mediocre grades won’t be recruited by consulting and finance firms. The ones who do are the ones who tended to study harder. But again, if high grades does not actually conform to a higher true value-add to society, but only to an ‘illusory’ value-add, then that means that students are wasting their time in studying hard when they could have utilized that time on more productive activities, again, another clear loss of value to society. </p>
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<p>Again, see above. Whether rankings/grades correlates with a true value-add or only an illusory one, the result is the same: society has lost value. The ‘best’ incoming engineering students should not want to a “top” engineering school, and once there, they should not strive to study to achieve top grades, because those provide only illusory benefits to society.</p>