<p>Where students would have to do 4 years of college and take prerequisite courses (such as calculus, physics, etc.) and possibly take an "ECAT"? After all, engineers are licensed professionals and many lives depend on their competence. Shouldn't we want the best of the best to go into this field?</p>
<p>What I can see happening is an alternate route developed to become an engineer. Instead of having to major in engineering in undergrad, students can major in anything during undergrad and then go on to grad school for engineering. In this scenario, the graduate engineering degree would be the equivalent of the undergrad engineering degree. This is how archiitecture programs function. At the same time, I can see undergrad engineering programs become more comprehensive since there is just so much to cover (ASCE has already been pushing for a master’s degree to become a requirement to sit for the PE exam). This meaning less electives outside of engineering.</p>
<p>Only raising the bar for entry into the engineering field won’t get the best of the best. At the same time, people need more incentive to want to do engineering.</p>
<p>Not to mention that unless salaries go up accordingly, many people will just not bother trying engineering if it took an extra X years after college like med school does.</p>
<p>If you’re not competent, you likely won’t make it through 4 years of undergrad engineering as it is.</p>
<p>Why? Engineering (all except maybe Civil but I don’t understand the research in Civil) is a field of scientific research. No one researches tax law or how to work at safeway. Doctors, Lawyers, Pharmacists just do the same thing over and over again with a few tiny variations. Engineers do real research, produce real, new products and contribute to new scientific knowledge. Turning engineering into professional school is an insult to all fields of engineering (except biomedical, they can dump that into the medical school).</p>
<p>Then why not raise salaries, accordingly? This will attract more bright people to engineering, even if it were to take 8 years and will give it a much higher prestige than it already has.</p>
<p>Doctors and pharmacists do scientific research as well, so your point is moot. And they can be compared to engineering in many ways, so it might just work out quite well if it were turned into a professional school.</p>
<p>I don’t understand why doctors and lawyers have to go to 4 years of undergraduate school before attending professional schools. It isn’t like they need the four years of schooling. To me it seems like a waste of most students’, who just want to get a job practicing law or medicine, time and money.</p>
<p>Sure, raise the salaries, but it’s up to the employers to make that decision. Are the extra courses you take worth the pay hike? Where does the money come from?</p>
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<p>This makes no sense. It also makes no sense for doctors or lawyers. If their real education as doctors and lawyers doesn’t begin until they get to med school or law school, it’s irrelevant what they do before that time. We already have the best engineers, tacking on four years of costly, irrelevant general studies is pointless and would lead to a <em>genuine</em> engineer shortage and make America’s tech industry disappear, not to mention make things like roads, utilities, and other engineering-related things which <em>can’t</em> be out-sourced ultra-expensive.</p>
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<p>You’re completely right. The reasons <em>why</em> we do such stupid things are varied, but the net effect, regardless of the intentions behind it, is to discourage people from becoming lawyers and doctors, leading to exorbitant costs for labor in those areas. Part of the reason healthcare is so darned expensive is because of the shortage of doctors. A shortage artificially created by licensing, med school costs and requirements, insurance requirements for physicians, and the extra cost of time and money getting a useless bachelor’s degree just so you can START the process of becoming a doctor.</p>
<p>There’s no reason why engineering should become a professional school. If we are concerned about competence, just require newly-minted engineers to take a test, say the “E-GRE”, and then have them take the PE test like they already do. Then you have to ask yourself, which engineering jobs would require a license?</p>
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It already exists. It’s the FE exam.</p>
<p>“Doctors and pharmacists do scientific research as well, so your point is moot. And they can be compared to engineering in many ways, so it might just work out quite well if it were turned into a professional school.”</p>
<p>No they don’t. An MD/PharmD is not a research degree. They do not have the ability to do creative, hands on research the way engineers do. An MD/PharmD is an 100000x inferior researcher to any BS in any engineering or hard science. All they learn is mindless memorization. Need a big hard drive but don’t need no processor. Engineering is nothing like healthcare. Engineering is not only the application of science, it IS a science in its own right, and the ability to do creative, hands on scientific research and critical thinking can’t be taught canned. Engineering courses do not only teach specific knowledge, specific knowledge is a TINY part of science; they teach how to think scientifically and quantitatively. Law/Pharm/Med on the other hand gives you canned bulls* and teaches useless trivia.</p>
<p>Research in pharmaceuticals is 99.99999% done by chemists, chemical engineers, IT managers, statistical analysts and biologists. Except for biologists, all of them are trained in the engineering mindset of thinking scientifically and quantitatively. PharmDs have nothing to do with pharmaceutical research, and they need maybe 1 MD for licensing issues for clinical tests, otherwise they don’t even need that.</p>
<p>the US is unique in that medicine is a cartel and existing doctors artificially limit the number of other doctors. in no other country are doctors and pharmacists paid obscene amounts of money. Not all doctors are ER neurosurgeons. Most of them can be replaced by a computer if it wasn’t for existing doctors vigorously suppressing both new doctors and technology that could replace doctors. Most medical research done by doctors (MDs) is garbage and statistically shows no difference from existing treatment.</p>
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<p>But it’s not really required, except for civil and structural engineers. Engineers in other disciplines, which comprise the vast majority of engineers, can progress through their entire careers without ever once thinking about the FE or PE exam. </p>
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<p>I don’t know about that. Richard Axel won a Nobel Prize for the discovery of olfactory genes. Eric Kandel won a Nobel for the discovery of the neural processes of memory. Edwin Krebs won a Nobel for the discovery of protein phosphorylation signalling. All of them had “only” MD’s. There are probably more. </p>
<p>I struggle to think of anybody with only a bachelor’s degree in engineering who has won a (science) Nobel. Even Jack Kilby had a master’s.</p>
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<p>IT managers are trained to think scientifically and quantitatively? Really? Are you sure?</p>
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<p>Yet even if everything you say is true, you have to admit that it’s an excellent deal for those doctors and lawyers who make it through the process. You say that such regulatory ‘cartelization’ processes create exorbitant labor costs. But one man’s exorbitant labor costs is another man’s high salary - something that engineering is sadly lacking at the moment. </p>
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<p>Yet, as you yourself conceded, despite their requirement for, as you say, 4 years of costly and irrelevant general studies, America’s law and medical ‘industries’ have clearly not disappeared. Far from it, in fact. I believe I read somewhere that total legal fees, as a percentage of the economy, recently reached record highs. </p>
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<p>Given the vast wealth of the country, and the penchant of people to spend far more on frivolous activities, I doubt that any increase in engineering costs would be any more than a rounding error.</p>
<p>Let me put it to you in perspective. Just think about how much money is spent on the sports industry, not just in terms of player salaries (NBA players now make an average of over $5 million each), but also in terms of tickets, merchandising, TV rights and associated advertising/sponsorship, stadium rights - all just for the pleasure of watching some grown adults chasing after a ball. And it’s not only money - just think about all the guys who spend hours on end managing their fantasy sports leagues and reading sports journalism. Heck, there are people who instigate violence after their team loses…or even if it wins. {Consider the riots in Philadelphia after the Phillies won the World Series.} </p>
<p>Given the tremendous share of resources that this country devotes to sports - and to pop culture in general - I hardly think that any additional resources provided to boost engineering pay would be a serious burden. </p>
<p>{For example, at the end of the day, who really cares if Tiger Woods broke his marriage vows, if Brett Favre unretires, or sexted somebody, or if LeBron James announces that he wants to play for Miami? Yet think of all of the media dollars and advertising spent in covering these stories.}</p>
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<p>But that is a process that can be used if companies choose to use it. If employers want to, they can choose to only hire engineering graduates that passed the FE exam. There is no major change in the educational system that has to take place.</p>
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But in those other fields, the extra years of schooling correspond with a significant increase in salary. Unless this happens in engineering as well, it will be detrimental to the field. </p>
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Engineering costs for roads, utilities, infrastructure are minute compared to construction costs.</p>
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<p>Companies could choose it today…but they don’t. That’s the point. And I see no incentive for them to do so.</p>
<p>So perhaps the real question is how does one create that incentive? A regulation could surely do the trick - the whole point of a regulation is to require companies to do something that they would not otherwise do. Schools also could take matters into their own hands and simply not graduate anybody with an engineering degree who doesn’t pass the FE exam. </p>
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<p>But they go hand in hand. The iron law of economics is that whenever you restrict the supply of something, the price of it - which in this case is the price of labor (the salary)- will increase. </p>
<p>Now, granted, whether the price increases by a sufficient amount to justify the extra burden is ultimately an empirical question. But the logic itself is sound. </p>
<p>Another strategy would be to (somehow) eliminate the low-end engineering schools. The engineering labor market would be significantly healthier if the bottom 25% of engineering programs did not exist. </p>
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<p>That only strengthens the argument. If engineering costs alone represent only a minute fraction of the entire costs of any infrastructural projects, then what does it matter if it those costs double or even triple? It surely would still cost far less than the silly spending that happens every day. {For example, who cares whether Lindsay Lohan is going to rehab or Miley Cyrus was smoking salvia, yet consider all of the media & advertising spending that is being devoted towards telling us such frivolities.}</p>
<p>But that doubling or tripling of engineering labor costs would mean a double/triple of engineering salaries.</p>
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But are you really restricting the supply of engineers? We can only regulate what goes on in our country. The engineering process for many industries can simply be moved elsewhere, thus eliminating the need to pay higher salaries to engineers here. What has to happen, is for companies to recognize the value of having better engineers. Things will not turn out well if engineers are treated as commodities.</p>
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I agree it doesn’t matter, but from the point of view of a company, why pay more when the status quo is sufficient?</p>