<p>Sakky, while I usually agree with, the affordability of New York City has more to do with its geographical location and being mostly surrounded by water. They simply have no where to build. Contrast that to Chicago which was able to build more outward. You can live comfortably in Chicago in a young trendy area as a single on half the money it costs to do the same in Manhattan. Heck, even the cost of living in the Bronx/Queens is more than Chicago. </p>
<p>Another example of the “sprawl” is LA, its not that there isn’t demand to live there, its that there is simply more space to live. </p>
<p>New York City is the exception not the rule.</p>
<p>Look, I’m just talking about trends. Living in the middle of nowhere - which is where many engineering jobs tends to be located - is less expensive than living in any city, whether NYC, Chicago or LA, because nobody really wants to live in the middle of nowhere. </p>
<p>One major advantage that any major city provides over living cheaply in the middle of nowhere is that the latter tends to confine you to one, or at most, a few potential employers. What if you take a job with such an employer and then get terminated? You probably have to move to find another job, which is especially problematic if you’ve established roots in the area (i.e you don’t want to uproot your kids from their friends, you have a house that you can’t sell). On the other hand, expensive engineering-centric locations such as Silicon Valley have many available employers - you lose one job, and you can probably find another.</p>
<p>Well, let’s be honest, most consulting/finance work, especially in the early career stages, isn’t particularly glamorous or groundbreaking either. What the heck is so groundbreaking about plugging in numbers into Excel spreadsheets that you didn’t even build, which is basically what most Ibanking analysts actually do? I would argue that that’s even less groundbreaking than writing a bunch of Perl scripts. Yet analysts nevertheless being paid very well.</p>
<p>Some do, e.g. MIT’s undergraduate management major (course 15) has a couple of quantitatively rigorous tracks. I imagine as time goes on, there will be more of this type of major, as businesses realize that you don’t need to hire engineering geeks to fill management positions, but you need people with analytical backgrounds who can both talk to the geeks and the suits.</p>
<p>I don’t have any factual information to back this up, but I’ve heard that it may be difficult to get a security clearance if you’ve ever seen a psychologist.</p>
<p>If education could be made less expensive, you could just retake classes that you were having trouble with. This might be a good idea in general; taking a class from a different professor who focuses on different topics or takes different approaches to solving problems can be helpful. In my dance classes, the teachers recommend retaking the classes several times with different teachers to get different perspectives and approaches.</p>
<p>Since you seem to be obsessed with the finance industry, note that quantitative finance jobs certainly can be STEM jobs.</p>
<p>Then again, the top paid people in the finance industry may not exactly have “cushy” jobs, at least at first. Could be a high stress job which can draw one into an expensive lifestyle that consumes much of the extra pay.</p>
<p>MIT has a much greater set of general education requirements which ensure, to a much greater extent than most schools, that its graduates (of all majors) have a well rounded liberal arts education, so that they have had to think in both mathematical/logical ways and humanistic/social ways. Yes, even literature and history majors at MIT have to take multivariable calculus, physics, chemistry, and biology (“real” versions, not “for poets” versions).</p>
<p>A few years ago, I had a discussion on this subject with an MIT grad from the 1980s who holds a similar US government engineering job and another, much more recent MIT grad. The general consensus was that the US government engineering work wasn’t particularly attractive to younger people with STEM backgrounds who could get jobs at places like Apple or Facebook (or wanted to). Issues of concern: are the companies LGBT-friendly? how much freedom to innovate do you have? to what extent can you share your work with others?</p>
<p>Those jobs are essentially unavailable to people with only bachelor’s degrees, even if it comes from a top technical school. You basically need a master’s or PhD to be eligible for quant finance jobs. </p>
<p>But I don’t think we should be hung up on labels. Whether you want to categorize quant finance within STEM, the point is that science and engineering careers don’t pay particularly well, relative to other careers that people with STEM degrees can obtain. </p>
<p>To take an example from academia, why is it that economics and (especially) finance professors are paid significantly more than are STEM professors? Heck, even a newly hired assistant professor of finance is paid more - sometimes by nearly double - that of a tenured full professor of STEM at the same university. It clearly has nothing to do with the scientific predictive success of the various disciplines, as even a casual observer would note that science and engineering have been far more successful enterprises in producing a set of rigorous, precise, non-obvious predictions than is economics/finance, despite the latter’s scientific pretensions. Nor does it seem to have much to do with the overall talent level of the various discipline: a tenured full professor of math is far more likely to be able to match the research of an assistant professor of finance than vice versa. </p>
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<p>I never said that those jobs were cushy. But let’s face it, plenty of engineering jobs are not exactly cushy either. The joke at Microsoft in the old days is that they offered flex-time: you could work any 70 hours of the week that you want. Google today is a notorious grind, despite the fact that you most likely won’t become rich by taking a job at Google today, as the IPO days are long past. </p>
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<p>I think the real issue is that I still haven’t seen an actionable yet non-obvious pathway for non-CS STEM graduates to utilize to obtain such jobs. Again, that’s not a knock on globaltraveler, as I suspect that such a pathway doesn’t exist. And I do give credit to him for trying to find one.</p>
Not sure why you’re still beating a dead horse… but we all know the finance industry does pay more than others and there is nothing our society can do about it… </p>
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The actionable path for STEM graduates to have a chance to work in finance or strategy consulting does exist…
It’s anecdotal of course, but an ex-coworker went to USC and then got hired at oppenheimer then recently at deutsche bank as an associate.
My part time structural analysis professor from cal poly (also work for englekirk - a very well known structural engineering firm) went to INSEAD and got a job at mckinsey.</p>
<p>They both were young when they left (early 30s)…</p>
<p>Oh, but there may be. Not in the short-run, to be sure, but in the long-run, things can change drastically. The notion that financiers must always be handsomely (over)paid is not an iron law. Keep in mind that it was only a few decades ago when the wages paid in finance began to diverge sharply from that of the rest of the economy, including STEM. </p>
<p>Imagine taking all of the taxpayer capital devoted to the bailouts and - more crucially - to the extraordinarily creative liquidity facilities opened by the Fed to the finance industry and instead devoting that to the tech industry. That is, instead of (or perhaps in addition to) finance firms being allowed to borrow at the Fed discount window, allow tech firms to do the same. Similarly, allow tech firms access to term loans at below-market rates. Instead of providing emergency equity capital injections to banks, provide equity capital for tech firms. And if any of that seems politically controversial to you, then fair enough, the most politically neutral solution would be to greatly increase R&D funding for basic academic science/engineering research grants through the NSF, NIH, and other scientific bodies. </p>
<p>To those who might say that the nation lacks the resources to do that in this time of austerity and sovereign downgrades, hey, we somehow managed to find large-scale resources to bailout the financial system.</p>
<p>Some Silicon Valley executives argued this very point. They gave, as an example, that instead of bailing out the auto companies, the money should have been provided as seed funding for hybrid vehicles, solar-powered vehicles, etc.</p>
<p>But let’s be frank - how many people are actually going to have TS/SCI+Poly clearance by the time they graduate? I would argue that that figure is far far smaller than even the number who are going to enter finance/consulting.</p>
<p>After all, globaltraveler stated himself that the process of obtaining such a clearance can take upwards of 18 months. To obtain such a clearance by graduation would therefore entail finding an employer who would sponsor you in your college junior year. That doesn’t seem likely.</p>