<p>This is just something that has been on my mind and I can't quite piece together. Engineering has a very good reputation of leading to a good job offers upon graduation, however almost every company I ever interviewed at required at least a 3.0 GPA. Many engineering students fall below the magical 3.0 since engineering GPAs tend to be low and there is little to no grade inflation. I heard that the average engineering GPA is around a 2.9 (Who knows for sure though!), which would mean that about half of all engineering majors are below the cutoff. So..... what happens to those engineers that don't have 3.0+ GPA? Do they get jobs also or is the 4 years they spent in college wasted, and they go work for walmart? I'm just curious, and it doesn't seem to add up.</p>
<p>college GPA’s don’t matter too much. They only matter when you’re first being hired. So for those with lower GPA’s, they have to work to companies with lower cutoffs. Most companies take experience over GPA, so for most students, after a year or two of working, their GPA’s won’t matter at all.</p>
<p>The percentage with offers varies pretty wildly by school and year as well. During this recession numbers were down and hiring standards were, on average, higher than usual. The top schools wouldn’t have felt that hit as hard on their recruitment stats though as companies would still often be going out of their way to recruit those schools.</p>
<p>To give you concrete numbers, the average engineering GPA at Georgia Tech is right at 3.04, so more than half of the students are over the 3.0 threshold. Typically, you see about 60% hired at graduation with about 30% going to grad school. That leaves roughly 10% unemployed at graduation. That holds surprisingly constant even in a bad economy (it’ll waiver between 55-65% for employment, etc. but it’s not much).</p>
<p>The numbers are a little skewed, though. You don’t know how many of that 30% are students who couldn’t find a job so they went back for an MS. Another thing you don’t know from the 60% are the number of students that are underemployed - they took a low wage job as a drafter because they couldn’t find actual engineering work.</p>