An engineering degree can pay off in other fields. I know plenty of folks that have an engineering degree and work in some other field. I had a job that was not related to my engineering degree, though my degree was part of the reason I got the job.
Employers want people with critical thinking skills. They know that to earn an engineering degree, you need certain skills that can be used in other careers, and that you have the capacity to learn other skills. While the Antarctic Cultural Studies student might have great critical thinking skills, there is no way for the employer to know.
Iâm of the opinion that students should study what most interests them at a school that they love and feel comfortable in. I have gone further with my math/science oriented kids in that I have asked that they include a healthy dose of liberal arts classes to ensure that they have a well rounded college experience.
Our S was completely sure about the area he wanted to study (CS, AI, ML), he was admitted to a school that I knew he would love and give him the opportunities to challenge himself. And he did take many liberal arts classes - philosophy, poetry, history, and even religion. He has said that these classes took comparatively more of his time as they were outside his area of established expertise and required extensive writing (not python). But now, looking back, heâs happy he invested the time and he values the learning gained in those classes.
In a few months our D will begin her college journey, and I hope she adopts the same strategy.
Yes, for sure. Financial advising, teaching, coffee shop owner. But the possibility of going into alternate fields should be accounted for when planning for college. Some teachers I know were strong-armed into engineering, and had to go back for educational classes and certifications, which meant additional time, expense, and lower income for paying student debt that could have been avoided.
Also, my early teen daughter is driven by literature and creative writing, but the STEM-focused public school culture doesnât give enough freedom to explore such interests. Multiple teachers have expressed frustration about the unstated will of government to make everyone engineers.
I know a structural engineer who left engineering and began brewing beer. He is now the owner and brewer at a very successful brewery and is extremely happy and fulfilled.
It is unfortunate if your daughterâs HS pushes STEM only. As far as the government goes, I think that the âeveryone goes to collegeâ message is harmful, but because there are a bunch of kids going for degrees in fluff useless âstudiesâ majors, and they incur a lot of debt for that degree.
I hope your daughter can find a balance. My kids took a combination of STEM and humanities courses in HS. Both the older two took two foreign languages through AP. Middle kid would love to support herself writing fiction for a living, though she knows that is unrealistic. She had a balance in college too, getting degrees in Linguistics and Applied Math, and a minor in Creative Writing. She is now in a doctorate program that combines elements of her two degrees. There are ways to find a balance, though you might have to look outside the standard path that your HS pushes.
While many traditionally non-engineering employers would be happy to hire engineers for their non-engineering positions, this is typically a very uncommon path. After receiving a bachelorâs in engineering, engineering majors generally look for engineering-specific jobs that do not hire non-engineers for the position. If engineering jobs are not available, then engineering grads often have a high unemployment rate, rather than look for jobs that are less directly related to their degree field. This is a very different pattern from humanities majors, where grads often take first jobs in a wide variety of fields that are not directly related to their degree.
For example, earlier in the thread I posted stats for new mechanical engineering grads at UW. Boeing is centered in Washington and is by far the largest employer of mechanical engineering UW grads and likely area mechanical engineers in general. In 2019 Boeing went through a crisis with the 737 crashes, grounding, and later $2.5B lawsuit that resulted in lay offs and dramatically changing their hiring behavior. Mechanical engineering jobs in the area around UW suddenly were in short supply. Rather than look for work in fields less related to mechanical engineering, a large portion of UW engineering grads were unemployed. Some did attempt to pursue a grad/professional degree in a different field that they perceived to have better career prospects, and some took engineering jobs that were not quite as related to mechanical as in typical years, but few looked for jobs outside of engineering. Some specific numbers are below:
UW Mechanical Engineers: <0 to 7 Months After Graduation
2018 â 84% Employed, 6% Seeking work, 6% pursuing MS/PhD in Mech Engineering
2019 â 39% Employed, 39% Seeking work, 18% continuing education â half in non-Mech Eng.
2018 â Most Common Job Titles: Mechanical Engineer, Engineer, Mechanical Design Engineer, Mechanical Systems Engineer
2019 â Most Common Job Titles: Mechanical Engineer, Manufacturing Engineer, Design Engineer, Process Engineer
2018 â 92% of employed say closely relates to career goal, 8% says not closely related
2019 â 86*% of employed say closely relates to career goal, 5*% says not closely related
*9.5% chose not to answer this question in 2019, All answered in 2018
I work in engineering and have personally seen that a minority of persons employed in engineering do at some point after working in engineering for awhile decide theyâd prefer to switch to a different and completely unrelated career. I know multiple engineers who have gone in to real estate investing (either landlord or flipping), as well as a few who have gone in to fields that few could have guessed like woodworiking . However, this is different from looking for non-engineering jobs immediately after college.
The closest thing to an exception I am aware of is schools that are not known for the strength of size of their engineering programs, and have a good portion of the student body go in to non-engineering fields that are associated with comparable/higher salaries than engineering. A good example is Yale. Stats for Yale are below. It looks like ~20% of mechanical engineering majors took consulting or finance jobs, whose primary function was not engineering. I imagine that some engineering majors were lured away by the prospect of a higher salary, and some started Yale with at least a partial interest in finance and/or consulting.
Yale Mechanical Engineers: 2019, 6 Months After Graduation
â74% Employed, 10% continuing education., 5% Entrepreneur, 5% Seeking work
âMost Common Job Function: 74% Engineering, 13% Consulting, 7% Entrepreneur, 7% Finance
âMost Common Job Industry: 60% Engineering, 13% Consulting, 13% Finance, 7% Energy
Public schools donât want to encourage interest in creative writing for many reasons. The most prominent IMO is because most public school students are not wealthy enough to pursue the humanities in college. Look at the winners of Scholastic Writing Awards â elite private schools and wealthy publics are over represented partly because those kids can afford to spend their time dabbling in something not lucrative. And the reason why multiple teachers are frustrated with the âgovernment encouraging everyone to be an engineerâ is because there is WAY more demand for engineering degrees than liberal arts degrees.
Bloomington- if you think learning to write well is not lucrative, you really need to get out of your bubble. And your point-only the wealthy can study the humanities, writing is âdabblingâ, etc. has been made over and over again. You donât seem to be open to ANY point of view beyond your own- which leads us all to suspect that the terrific critical thinking you are learning in a STEM degree is selling you short.
But thereâs no point addressing facts with someone who has an axe to grind. Go forth with your CS degree or whatever it is you are studying and prosper!
This is such a fascinating thread. I do think that STEM majors make more coming out of college than other majors, but after that, it can go either way. Your marketing, history, english, art majors are often the ones getting managerial roles which raises their salary over time.
The surveys from UW and Yale focus on the first several months post-graduation. Fair enough, as prospective students want to know this information. I am more concerned about the longer term, because just as there is a weed-out process in the first 2 years of engineering study, there seems to be a similar process post-graduation that would show most grads initially working in a related field, but falling off as time goes by.
This is old data, but it has an interesting graphic showing the industries in which engineering grads work, which doesnât focus on the post-graduation period. Roughly half are in an unrelated role.
Engineering can often be a soulless endeavor, relying on oneâs affinity for technical challenges and problem solving. This is in contrast to the camaraderie and commiseration in college when laboring through the difficult classes with a lot of peers. For some, the reward is more social than in the satisfaction of solving a problem.
The American Community Survey median wages by major were posted earlier in the thread. In the ACS sample, the median mid-career wages of humanities majors at age ~40 was less than the early career wages for tech a few years after college. The median wages of humanities majors did not catch up to tech midcareer, nor did all majors converge to the same midcareer wages. Instead wage gaps for different majors remained throughout the career.
This does not mean that every humanities major is doomed to a life of poverty, or that every tech major will earn a 6-figure salary. There is a huge amount of individual variation for a wide variety of reasons, and countless individual exceptions of humanities majors who had great outcomes with high earnings and high job satisfaction. Some humanities will have managerial roles later on in their career, including CEOs, and a similar statement could be said about tech majors. Some humanities majors will also work also work in fields associated with lower mid/career earnings, and again a similar statement could made about tech majors. However, when you look at medians, averages, ranges, âŠ; a significant difference remains for different majors.
While a significant difference in median earnings occurs for different majors, this does not mean everyone should choose the majors or career fields associated with the highest earnings; as seems to be common among students at highly selective colleges. Instead this is just one of many factors students should consider when choosing a major and career goal. Obviously a key factor is also choosing a major and career that you will enjoy or can atleast tolerate.
If you click on âview tableâ it shows the specific numbers in an Excel spreadsheet which are listed below. It seems that some engineering majors later on move to the management track. A significant portion also work in CS, perhaps largely due to higher salary potential in recent years. These 3 categories of engineers, managers, and CS compose the vast majority of engineering majors. A smaller minority work in sales, business, production, construction, or education. Perhaps these are unrelated to engineering â perhaps not. For example, I know several engineering majors work in engineering sales. I also know several who teach engineering classes at university. I wouldnât call either âunrelatedâ to their major. I suspect that youâll find a lot of related categories like this particularly among engineering major subdivisions with some EECS/CompEng majors working in CS, some industrial engineering majors working in production, some civil engineering majors working in construction, etc. I certainly wouldnât make the leap to assume they are mostly switching to an unrelated career after discovering engineering is a âsoulless endeavor.â
Among Engineering majors:
33% work as engineers
18% work as managers
15% work in computer related
5% work in sales
5% work in business
4% work in production
4% work in construction
4% work in education
all other categories are less than 3%
Engineering classes at highly selective colleges typically try to emphasize collaboration with peers and group work because that is how engineering typically is in the work place. Itâs often kind of like a really long and complex group project, with a lot of collaboration and interaction with peers, often working with peers throughout the day.
My daughterâs highly rated High School was extremely STEM driven. If you were a good student you were told you needed to load up on AP science classes (no push for taking the AP humanities and at the time they didnât even offer AP art). We were just discussing this, looking back on her HS class of 2012, a large majority of those excellent students who took all these crazy tough science classes did not end up as college science majors and are not pursuing careers in the sciences. They are doing a mix of things - from pursuing PhDs in humanities (with a goal of becoming professors) to working at consulting/brokerage firms. Only a handful have become doctors or are getting advanced degrees in the sciences (to pursue research as a long term goal).
A humanities major (just like others) needs to take advantage of internships and research positions etc. There are certainly jobs out there, and your first job will not be your last.
I mentioned that my daughterâs 2 friends from college were sociology majors. One was offered a job at a top university teaching at a private school (on the campus) affiliated with the university. The university paid for her masters.
The other friend (sociology major) worked for an organization that helps with career planning for HS and college grads. She stayed for 2 years and is now doing research.
She has 2 other friends from college- one was a political science major, and the other had a double major in journalism and political science. They are both in DC- one works directly for a politician and the other works for an organization that helps write and deliver policy.
Donât discount something like Teach for America (and other similar organizations). They hire all kinds of humanities majors to teach a variety of subjects for 2 years (the salaries are not bad and you get health insurance- you also have an instant friend group once you relocate). Guess what? After you are finished with the 2 years (some choose to stay) and become an alumni, you can join their Capitol Hill Fellows Program, which is a one year, paid congressional staff position. These kids gain experience at the national level. I just looked up the stipend- itâs $67,000 a year.
My D was the âdreadedâ biology major who wanted to work before heading back to school. She wanted the time to figure out which direction to take her degree. She applied to 4 jobs, received 4 interviews and 3 job offers. Her salary was not low- it allowed her to live in an expensive city and save a considerable amount of money toward her next degree. The resume she developed while in college - no doubt - helped her get those interviews (3 of the interviews were at top universities, one was at a well known organization).
There is a whole world out there outside of engineering.
I donât recall anyone mentioning Teach for America in this thread, but it is a surprisingly (to me) popular option among humanities majors at highly selective colleges. At several highly selective colleges, Teach for America is the most popular employer of humanities majors after the home university. Whether the salary is ânot badâ depends on definitions. It typically is on par with salaries associated with teaching at secondary schools, which is also a not uncommon path. There is a good amount of variation depending on location. The TFA website used to say a typical salary range was $25k to $51k. Now the website range has increased that range to $33k - $58k.
According to Box , in 2021 13 fellows were chosen of 225 applicants. Thousands of kids do Teach for America, but there were only 13 fellows. Those arenât good odds.
I know quite a few Ivy League grads who did TFA in recent years. It might be worth it to some to check out their website and see where alumni end up working. Itâs not for everybody, but some love it and stay on. Others move into positions within the organization, go into education policy, education law, etc. And others go into fields that have nothing to do with education.
TFA members are on the teacherâs salary scale, which of course depends on the area. The participants I know started in the 60âs.
Itâs a competitive program- last I checked the acceptance rate was about 20% and required multiple interviews and essays. Again- itâs not for everybody, but it is an option and a stepping stone for all majors, including the humanities.
Interesting observation. My upper middle class suburban area has options for students to apply to attend a STEM magnet high school as well as another program which offers a very rigorous STEM program with language arts/humanities/social sciences etc. taught on alternate days at the studentâs local high school.
The student who excels in writing or other non stem academics? AP classes but no special programs. No IB program offered.
Both of my kids were humanities majors. My English major (gasp!) had a career in a field relating to her major and loved it but admittedly it was not highly paid. She left to earn an MBA (full ride) and is now employed in a different field but uses her critical thinking, written and spoken communication skills daily.
My other child worked in Big 4 consulting before starting a grad program. His program as well as his chosen field require a similar skill set.
Group work isnât unique to selective colleges. But no matter where it is taught, the best any college can do is provide an idealized version of a common working experience in industry.
Aside from a sprinkling of non-traditional students, undergrad programs are homogeneous compared to any field experience they will have. Students are of similar age, ability, live / dine with each other, etc. This social connection is the opposite of the âsoulless endeavorâ I speak of.
In the field, there is likely to be a much greater mix of age, ability, background, and field of study. Not only that, but âgroupâ work tends to be a collection of individual efforts that are gathered and discussed periodically. After adapting, most post-grads find this to be
an OK arrangement.
But often times, the pursuit is ultimately just a better widgetâsomething inanimate that canât match the satisfaction of tackling an academic challenge amongst a group of close-knit peers in school. Or give one a feeling of making a difference in the world. Soulless.
Your numbers may accurately suggest that quickly punting on a career within oneâs field of study isnât often the case. But I wouldnât say it is rare. I see it all the time.