Why so few US citizens in Engineering graduate schools? 7

[ParabolicTet]

I've always wondered why US citizens don't pursue advanced engineering degrees? They are a minority in most universities. It makes no sense because Silicon Valley is full of very high paying software engineering jobs. Other disciplines may not pay those high rates but still offer very well paid and rewarding work..

I remember working at megacorp and seeing a bunch of maintenance workers coming to fix some pipe or something. These people had been in the country for generations and had excellent command of the language, customs and culture. Yet they were probably earning half of what the engineers in that building earned. Plus their work had an element of danger to it. Most of the engineers in the buidling were foreign born who had poor to modest command of the language and minimal understanding of the cultures/customs. Some of them were technical managers and such.. The dichotomy strike me as very odd.

I guess same thing applies to my US citizens don't go to Medical school also...

 

[IRstuff]

I don't know that the 30% figure is necessarily from that; 40 years ago, fewer schools had engineering departments; computer science as a degree wasn't that big a thing (math majors would be hired as computer programmers when they couldn't find something more seriously math related). But, the conventional wisdom became "an engineering degree is the E-ticket"; which drove up applications, which drove up class sizes, which drove sleepy unis into engineering powerhouses. However, a side note from the engineering graduate thread in the Pub is that not all graduates are cut out to be engineers. That's almost always been the case, but more recently, the push has been so strong that people that neither have the "knack" nor the "calling" are graduating with engineering degrees, but some of them probably shouldn't have. Certainly, the likes of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etal, are now driving more people into computer science and more schools are hosting computer science departments. UC Berkeley just formed a data science department whose first year engendered 780 declarations of major, compared to the CS and EECS departments' total enrollment of around 3200.

Case in point, 40 years ago, UC Berkeley was pretty much THE engineering school in the UC system; today, UCB, UCLA, UCSD (former party school), UCI, UCSC (another former party school), UCSB (another former party school), UCD (Cal Aggie) and UCR all have engineering departments. And each school is about double in size from 40 years ago.

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[skeletron]

Importance, availability, and cost of education in International versus North American schools
Ease to transition from a domestic degree to a PE is more straightforward than for an international degree


...but I can't recall if I have ever solved that problem yet.

 

[Brainton]

May be jobs mostly available in this field of work.

 

[IRstuff]

Part of the issue is that a college is a 4-yr time lag, relative to the needs of industry, and while people in the US will soon see that we've got a glut of most engineering disciplines, for people in other countries, engineering is still the way out of lower classes. Unfortunately, it takes so long to identify trends in the economy that we're always in over/under supply situations

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