<p>Hunh... most of the points I was going to make (including the fact that I took Vibrations with a whole bunch of other mech seniors, and the fact that buildings and bridges <em>do</em> move, thankyouverymuch, and the fact that I'm a "she" and not a "he") have already been made by others. Thanks, y'all.</p>
<p>Anyhoo, <em>some</em> civ programs out there at non-top-tier engineering schools <em>can</em> be easy. ABET requirements currently allow the ease with which some people can get civil engineering bachelors degrees. One thing that's pretty important to mention, however, is that civil engineering curricula all over the nation are undergoing massive, massive renovation. With the advent and rise in popularity of finite element computation and the capability to provide more intensive structural analysis of building and bridge systems, there's just too much material out there to cover in four years. Things are getting edged out and glossed over, and ABET accreditation's partially allowing that, which is really pretty bad. The top tier programs are demanding more of their students, requiring that they put in those extra hours and go more in-depth with all the extra material. We learn as much mechanics as mechanical engineers, as much steel metallurgy as material scientists, half as much computational mathematics as computer science majors, half as much pure environmental engineering as the environmental engineers. Then there are the not-so-top-tier programs, where each course is just a crash course in transportation engineering, or hydrology, or steel/concrete design... They "cover" all the material, but the students don't learn it. It's a little bit scary, and ABET and the ASCE are starting to recognize that.</p>
<p>Building bridges, and buildings, and oil rigs... that's not easy. There's nothing trivial about that. As my steel design prof said, "Doctors only kill their clients one at a time." There's a massive amount of responsibility on structural engineers to get it right, and we truly are held liable if we screw up. Even now, just as an EIT, if I spot something wrong on a job site and don't say anything, if it causes problems in the future and people lose their lives because I didn't mention the problem when I saw it, if it's traced back to me in twenty years once I'm a senior consultant somewhere, I can and will lose my license and livelihood.</p>
<p>The "easier" civ careers out there have nothing to do with structural. There's traffic engineering. Signing and striping. Parking lot design. Roadway design. Land development. There's some fairly cookie-cutter work out there.</p>
<p>What I see happening in the future with civil engineering curricula is that the demands on civil engineers during their educational years are going to start to be higher. A major shakedown's coming. Look up ASCE's "Body of Knowledge" concept and paper. ASCE is starting to push for legislation to make the masters degree the first professional degree. This means that in order to get a PE license, a civil engineer would have to get a masters degree. No more bachelors-degreed PEs. I think you're going to see a lot more "civil engineering technology" type degrees... Dental hygeinists to the civil engineer's doctor-of-dentistry, if you will... in order to do the sort of thing that the "easy" civil engineering degrees currently provide, and that civil engineering on the whole, and the ability to get one's license, is going to get a heck of a lot harder.</p>
<p>Most of the folks out there are somewhere in between the two extremes. I'm at the high-end of the civ eng spectrum, having gone into structural engineering and received my masters degree from U of I. It's the folks at the lower end of the spectrum that are the ones bragging about how easy civ eng is, and they're the predecessors of the future civs who don't end up getting PE licenses.</p>