Why College Students Leave the Engineering Track
economix.blogs.nytimes.com
economix.blogs.nytimes.com
You can't skate through with a b.s., content free essay on the plight of the modern farmer in a consumer world, shackled by the inadequacies of an archaic nation-state governing system or a 5-paragraph essay on the plight of the Hellenic world during the rise and fall of the Roman Empire -- getting A's only because it's properly formatted and has the right number of words, arranged roughly into the right number of paragraphs.
The "soft" subjects in college were easy. I could put off any assignment until the last night, then whip something up before class and guarantee an A.
My engineering classes on the other hand, were so hard, so time consuming, that I spent at least 6-8 hours outside of class for every hour I spent in class. A 12 credit semester might mean 80 hours outside of class writing code, reading books, trying desperately to grok complex data structured and mind-bending math. Write it wrong, and it crashes, or the answer is wrong, and you get an F.
I took an English class in college that was probably one of my toughest classes in college (yes, about as tough as my math classes) - the professor and the TA's tore apart each paper ruthlessly, and judged them at a quality slightly below academic papers. I wrote a paper that was well formatted and had decent grammar in it, but it was summarily torn apart and was given a C on the paper, because my arguments in the paper sucked.
Also, I'd say that Philosophy is also a pretty damn tough subject in the 'soft subjects' of college. You're expected to be nearly as technical as a mathematician in your arguments, except you're writing essays/articles in prose, rather than with terse explanations and symbols. Philosophy took about as much time for me to study for as my math classes.
If you want professors on the whole to be better and more accurate graders, you have to give them incentives to do so. Which I discuss in more detail here: http://jseliger.com/2011/04/02/grade-inflation-what-grade-in....
The reason I'd give for this is that in some sense philosophy does have correct answers, if and only if a question is framed within an existing philosophical model.
The point of philosophy (as I see it) is trying to work out which philosophical model is most correct - a bit like a choosing between scientific theories.
Instead of testing against measurable things in the real world, philosophers derive logical outcomes from propositions within linguistic/logical systems and compare them to detect inconsistencies.
Therefore it's fine to ask a question about the consequences of a particular line of thought if a particular philosophical framework is specified, because you can mark a student not only on whether they arrived at an expected answer but also on the quality of their argument (i.e. how they got there).
Philosophy is every bit as difficult as any advanced Math course I'm familiar with. You learn the rules and axioms of the philosophy, and work within it, and those rules can be as complicated as any other kind of complex logic.
I'm specifically talking about what's considered an undergraduate degree in "English" or "History" or "English History" or some such. I had the fortunate happenstance to go through an undergraduate program that really wanted their engineers to be well rounded. Back in those days we were required to take 3 years of 2 classes a year of English Lit, 2 years of History (a year of Western Civ and a Year of some non-Wester civ), Speech, Communications, etc. for every Engineering Degree and a couple other "soft" courses.
These classes were more annoying than hard. Once you figured out what the teacher was looking for (usually within 2 or 3 short essays), you could write all day on that subject and in that style and get A's. It was literally "programming" for the teacher. Good grades were programs that ran well, bad grades due to grammar or spelling issues were syntax errors, bad grades due to content were run-time.
The first is that you're confusing the quality of your (from the sound of it, lower division) undergraduate English program with the quality of English as a discipline. The study of literature, in English or any other language, is, at its core, philosophical.
The second is that no discipline, not even engineering, is immune to students coasting by doing the bare minimum. Criticizing English because you breezed through a couple of lower division surveys is like criticizing computer science because you breezed through a class on HTML.
Yes, if taught well, the liberal arts can be as rigorous as mathematics. But teaching, say, English, well is whole lot harder than teaching mathematics well. There's just a lot more subtlety that has to be communicated. This means that in practice, there are proportionally fewer good Liberal Arts teachers than there are good math teachers. The quality and rigor of undergraduate liberal arts suffers as a result.
Precisely from the point of view of science, no field takes precedence over the others, neither nature over history nor vice versa. No one method of dealing with objects dominates the others. Mathematical knowledge is no more rigorous than philological-historical knowledge. It merely has the character of "exactness," which is not the same as rigor. To demand exactness of the study of history goes against the specific rigor of the humanities.
Anyway, anecdotally, four years of shepherding would-be engineers through basic writing requirements was enough for me to conclude that as a group, engineers are singularly terrified by the absence of right-or-wrong answers. For my part, I'm glad to have had a rigorous grounding in the humanities before stumbling into coding.
It's like what Eric Raymond says about Lisp: "Lisp is worth learning for . . . the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days." A sufficiently rigorous study of art and philosophy and history won't just show you new things; it will give you new eyes. It's a shame most people (including, of course, many with humanities degrees) miss out on this.
Re: Heidegger: To counter, there's a fairly accepted concept in the sciences that there is a loose hierarchy of the sciences. e.g. Biology is just a subset of Chemistry is just the study of a part of Physics, which is a study of applied Math, which is a subset of Mathematics, which is just a specialization of a subset of Philosophy.
It reminds me of this http://flowingdata.com/2011/06/08/all-roads-lead-to-philosop...
Re: Engineer's proclivity towards right-wrong answers in their work. I agree, and it may be a function of the kind of thinking style that lends itself well to engineering disciplines. The curricula I looked at for Engineers seemed to express an intense desire on the part of the schools to break their engineers out of this kind of mental slavery and to grok softer subjects as valid. Many people who want to become engineers do so because they've mentally dismissed the validity of subjects with non-binary outcomes. I think their is a need to put engineers through a well rounded curriculum that includes exposure to the arts. I think this is very important.
But it means as a side effect that they receive a non-trivial portion of a standard liberal arts education on top of the study of their own field. (In my opinion schools that don't provide this kind of education to their engineers are doing their students a great disservice.)
In the lower-division courses, both CS and most liberal arts have objective answers you can test on, many of which are memorization. Comparison-based sorting can't be done in better than O(n log n); Marx was not present at the Paris Commune (neither was Bakunin, though he was involved in a related uprising in Lyon); most hash-table designs have amortized constant time for most operations; a key difference between Fichte and Kant was that Fichte rejected the notion of a thing-in-itself; etc.
I think it may be true that CS is more likely to actually test on them, in part because many universities expect their liberal-arts courses to double as de-facto "how to write" courses, so they're supposed to have students do essays rather than test them on the subject matter. Imo they would be better structured as having intro-level classes teach subject matter that's tested on in a more rigid style, and then move students to developing their own arguments in essays more towards the 201 level once they've gotten a certain basic amount of factual knowledge under their belt. But that would require teaching intro writing skills somewhere else, and the main alternative, a dedicated "freshman composition" type class, is pretty widely disliked by students and not considered a great success, because it's sort of disembodied writing, "how to write" without any actual subject matter.
Once you got to upper-division courses, most of my philosophy and my CS classes were pretty similar in terms of not really having objective, right-or-wrong answers. There were definitely things you could do that were ridiculous and therefore wrong, but for the most part it involved making a case for something.
A data-mining project, for example: Given a data set, what can you conclude from it? What's your evidence, what are the potential pitfalls with your evidence, how would you present the results?
The methodology is different, but in terms of general approach and the subjectiveness of grading, that felt very similar to me to a philosophy course project, one of which was: develop and argue a case for or against the possibility that machines could produce "creative" output.
In both those examples it has less to do with there really being a "right" answer than with being sufficiently fluent with the tools of the domain to build and coherently present a supportable case, while avoiding doing anything that's clearly "wrong", like misusing statistics or using examples that don't logically support your point.
I actually think that supports my idea here -- that a competently trained engineer should be able to operate competently in a traditionally liberal arts field -- because a competently trained engineer has to learn both skill sets. Upper level courses like Data Mining require both the engineering bits, and the art bits of the liberal arts.
Interpreting the results of a Data Mining algorithm requires a similar critical analysis and writeup of any upper level Lit coursework. The demonstration of how the student wrote their analysis is as important as their conclusions.
This is different than say "write a paper detailing the differences and similarities between decision trees and neural networks", which is akin to "write a paper about the goals and purposes of the Paris Commune -- and why it failed".
The differences then between an engineer and a English major, in the field of English, is not a matter of skill, but a matter of exposure. An engineer is less likely to have studied in depth the brief life of the Paris Commune, but should be able to competently write about it once they know the material. What makes Engineering hard as a discipline is that the Engineer must not only have memorized the material, and be able to competently write about it, they must also apply it and show it working. That 3rd bit is why people drop from engineering programs and where the right/wrong objective evaluation brutalizes the unprepared student who was expecting subjective evaluation of their work.
I honestly hope that you can illuminate me -- the corpus of books available in the language are the same for both you an I. Before school, I toyed around with being an English major and a survey of programs at the schools I was interested in didn't really seem to offer course loads that would have provided me with any particular insight except maybe an extended survey of Milton's work.
Years later, based on my anecdotal experience, I find it obvious that my school mates who went on to major in liberal arts can't find work that pays as well as engineering. Any decent engineer could, more or less, do their jobs. Supply far outstrips demand and the training to become an Engineer requires a superset of the skills required to graduate with a B.A. in English.
Again, based on my anecdotal and singular experience, suppose a massive nuke went off in the atmosphere and the EMP wiped out all electrical equipment on the planet. I have no doubt that any competent engineer that went through a school with a reasonably well rounded curriculum would find work as a copywriter for some periodical someplace. A week or two to the learn the style and content the editor wants and off you go. It literally isn't rocket science. If they can effectively communicate in writing, they can participate at a reasonably high level in English as a discipline. The opposite is not true. Very few English majors could "fall" into an engineering job and be up and running in a couple of weeks. Engineering is simply harder and sticking it to a B.S. in <insert Engineering discipline> requires the student to almost learn a superset of the skills needed to get a B.A. in <insert English discipline>.
A spot check of programs at highly ranked liberal arts schools (I'm avoiding well known engineering schools on purpose here) shows coursework necessary for a B.A. in English Lit involves classes in "American Lit: Civil War to Present", "Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton", "Myth, Symbol and Allusion in Literature" (yes, actual title), "British Literature 1785 to Present", "Latin American Literature (In Translation)", "Film, Media and History" and electives that include "pick a major author (approved by your Faculty Advisor)", "any writing course", "any historical period including modern writing", "Film" (or as I like to call it "watch some movies and write a 5 paragraph essay on what you just watched". In other words, everything that every engineer at my school either had to do, or just did as part of their normal business in other coursework. Not exactly mind-bending stuff.
Here's Amherst College's (I picked them since they are one of the top ranked Liberal Arts schools in the country) actual program https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/departments/english/maj...
"Majoring in English requires the completion of 10 courses offered or approved by the Department. Students are encouraged to explore the Department’s wide range of offerings in literature, film, and culture. Rather than prescribe any particular route through its curriculum, the Department helps its students develop their own interests and questions, which are then recorded in the students' concentration statements."
Yes that's right, 10 whole courses. By way of comparison, I had to do 50% of Amherst's English major for my Engineering degree just as a minimum requirement. Had I stayed on an extra semester I could have knocked off the equivalent of the entire program had my school offered Amherst's program.
You must take One Level I course, Three Level II courses, One Level IV course, and just to make it extra hard, a course addressing pre-1800 material (which usually really means 1500-1800, heaven forbid anybody study Beowulf). In other words, Intro, three sophomore levels, one proper senior level, and then Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. Not exactly stunning stuff. Brilliantly, I didn't see a single school that had a course about the century of Science Fiction and Fantasy literature that fills bookshelves these days.
Yeah there's some levers the schools can pull to simulate hardness: pile on more readings, assignments in longer essay forms, period lit, translations. But at some point it just becomes busy work. Either you can read a work and write an essay to the assignment or you can't. Figuring out the particular philosophy the instructor wants you to emphasize in their class is an added twist, but it isn't like solving Fermat's last theorem.
By comparison, a random state school I looked at offered a sample schedule for CS students that required an English course per year through their Junior year, A year of Western Civ, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Fine Arts, Something called Global Understanding, Ethics and Law, 16 courses in CS, 4 in Mathematics, 2 in nonrelated engineering such as EE or Civil, 3 semesters of Natural Sciences with labs and must require calculus in the coursework...no Earth/Environmental Sciences for Arts majors, and on top of that, just because CS majors need extra help, a public speaking course and one more humanities course. In the course of a single week you might go from writing a paper on Chaucer, preparing a speech, finishing your chemistry lab, writing an operating system and then back to a paper on Charlemagne followed by homework in Statistics. No wonder people drop out of Engineering disciplines. This kind of curriculum is unbelievable hard.
A specific example a la Amherst, here's Georgia Tech's core CS requirements (this doesn't even include the actual CS courses)
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/future/undergraduates/bscs/corereq
4 Humanities Courses, 4 Social Sciences, 3 Lab Sciences, 5 Maths, 4 other courses, then you can get to the requirements for the major.
So at Georgia tech, just to get to the part of the your degree that you want to take, you have to accomplish 40% of Amherst's English major and a bunch of other stuff.
I agree that there are some elements of advanced literary analysis and writing that my figurative competent engineer might struggle with because of lack of domain knowledge. I certainly couldn't write an extended critique on the use of monologues in English translations of 18th Century Portuguese Enlightenment critiques off the top of my head -- or write an extended Avant Garde piece without falling into obvious uses of Absurdism. But I doubt many undergrad English Lit majors could do the same (I have yet to meet any myself) since the coursework at most schools I looked at didn't touch these subjects at all. I couldn't find a single undergrad English course in my survey of B.A. programs that looked even the slightest bit more daunting than what I had to take for my engineering program. A class on Milton? Pish Posh! A class on North African Poetry? No sweat! Depression Era Authors? Puffincakes!
"The second is that no discipline, not even engineering, is immune to students coasting by doing the bare minimum. Criticizing English because you breezed through a couple of lower division surveys is like criticizing computer science because you breezed through a class on HTML."
It's true, there are different levels of programs. While writing this I ran across a couple questionable programs that probably wouldn't put out a very good engineer. But something to keep in mind is that in most of the engineering programs I'm talking about, the minimum requires means that you got things undoubtedly correct. You got the right answers in the math exams, your programs ran and gave the expected output (and passed the anti-cheat detection software), you built the clocked full-adder correctly and it lit up the right number of lights, you derived Newton's formulas from your lab experiments correctly, or measured the pH of the solution without contaminating the sample. You did all this while also taking all the Reading, Writing, Memorizing and Speaking classes your school demanded of you.
You can't just fill up a paper with meaningless koan vomit, half of it copied from the Internet and get by with a C. If your full adder tells you that 2+3 = purple and your labwork shows that the acceleration of gravity near Earth's surface is 73.9 m/s^2 you get an F.
A grade other than an A or F doesn't mean you successfully argued the point to the professor that your code wasn't meant to run properly as a statement about the absurdity of Women's roles in the Elizabethan Nobility and your teacher just tossed you a bone to get you to stop harassing him on his personal phone number at 3am. It means that it still ran, but failed to provide the expected output for 1 out of a billion possible inputs. It's wrong and buggy, but you don't fail the course because in the real world QA and proper automated tests should catch that anyways.
I remember one course in particular, over the semester my 3 person team wrote a minimal multi-tasking operating system and software stack that included a pretty full user space, a text editor, system level IM and email, an ftp client and server, etc. and got a C+ because we never were able to squash the one bug that didn't allow the system to host itself, even after devoting 2 solid months of 90 hour weeks to it. Oh, and we had to write a paper, build a website, an instruction guide, and about 100 other pages of material for the system. That bug was the only thing that we didn't get perfect marks on and that was all it took, goodbye 4.0.
Back to the main question then, why do people drop out of engineering? Because it's goddamn hard. People will fall into other majors that are simply put easier.
I find non-hard-science courses to be a little easier in general, but not much easier and not always. You sometimes get professors in a subject like art history who have very specific ideas about how an essay should be structured and what elements are legitimate topics of discussion. Being grammatically correct is often not good enough. There can be quite a bit of intellectual challenge in figuring out what type of essay will result in a good grade, and being able to do this sort of thing may translate into increased chances of success in terms of dealing with customers, coworkers, or managers.
At this point I consider it easier to write a program than an essay. At least with a program there is a standard for the language, and a compiler for me to test the outcomes with before I turn it in. The absolute nature of discrete math can be a comfort, not a difficulty.
I think some CS Engineers get a biased view of other subjects because they only take the introductory or elementary versions of other courses. Some English major may have to stretch his brain for many hours to decipher the meaning of something written hundreds of years ago, in a different dialect and with the context of a different time period; it would be wrong for him to dismiss electrical engineering just because he thought that applying the power rule in calculus 1 wasn't that hard.
And philosophy majors get this type of "soft-major" criticism the most, but let us not forget that our computers are philosophy machines.
Edit: I add this to note that cparedes made similar points as I typed this
As it turns out, this is exactly why I thought those subjects are not as challenging. Once you figure out how to program a teacher, the classes can lose their challenge.
Sadly, most of the teachers I've encountered since 1st grade were not of this ilk. Most had particular favorite interpretations of the literature and if you didn't regurgitate their favored spin on a subject you'd get C's or lower.
It took me till near the end of High School before I figured out that "game" so it's not trivial by any means. But there were always clues. For example, a particular lit class I took consisted entirely of Women's lit material, I was the only male in the class, and the discussions circled around various women's causes. The professor never specified that Women's issues were the flavor of the class, but everything else made it trivial to hack out 5 page essays about the plights of various female characters at the hands of their male tormentors. I ended the class with an reference letter and an introduction to study Lit at Oxford -- which I turned down for many issues.
Note: I'm not putting down Women's causes in the slightest, only the lack of rigor in the coursework for the particular class I took.
As a former math/cs student, this seems a tad dramatic. A large portion of the marks on tests tended to be awarded to the process of how your worked out your solution, not just the final answer.
What differs drastically, and objectively, (and FYI, I'm an engineering grad) is the QUANTITY of work.
I had a very enlightening conversation with the professor who taught my 2nd year differential equations course (who was a math, not engineering, professor, and also the chair of undergraduate studies for that department, meaning that he was responsible for pretty well all undergraduate curriculum matters) where he told me that the entire BSc in mathematics program was designed to contain no more than 15 lecture hours per week, and to require a capable student to spend approximately 20-30 hours per week in addition to that in home study to master the material. A course would be considered well taught and well balanced if capable students were getting As while putting in this level of work. He went on to say that the Faculty of Applied Science had forced him to add 3 hours per week (one additional 1hr lecture and 2hr lab/tutorial) to his ODEs course for engineering science majors even though the content was identical to course offered for math majors. This is because the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board uses one and only one metric to determine a student's level of learning in a particular top - number of instructional hours. That is, if you teach people to solve y = y' for 6 hours a week for one semester (13 weeks), that is entirely equivalent to having taken ODEs for math majors (2 hrs / week), PDEs for math majors (2 hrs / week), and advanced PDEs for math majors (also 2 hrs / week).
I was of course appalled by this and went on to discuss the topic with the Undergraduate Chairs of as many departments as I could - physics, chemistry, economics, philosophy, biology, and of course, my home department, engineering science.
Without fail, the chairs of the non-engineering departments described a similar ideal schedule to what the math prof had said - and all of them emphasized that they felt students should have at least one day a week to devote to entirely extracurricular interests, while still having enough time to attend all scheduled lectures and tutorials, mastering the material and generally achieving 80% or better in all courses. In other words, you shouldn't need to be a slacker in order to have fun.
What did the chair of my department tell me? "We expect students to spend 30-40 hours per week in class, in order to meet accreditation board requirements for instructional hours, and further, to spend about 30-40 additional hours per week to complete their assignments and master the material. Also, when I was an undergraduate I had it just as bad so STFU and get on with it."
In sum, engineering educators have a fundamentally different view on what a full-time student's life should be like. And it is a view that necessarily compels a lower quality of life for the student.
Sounds vaguely like the notion abusive parents use when they hit their kids, "well my parents did it to me and I turned out alright"
People select engineering as a career for the money, not because they actually want to do it for a living.
In 1995 I was starting high school and had signed up for computer programming classes and was teaching myself along with my friends.
In 1999 I fell in love with finance and realized I hated programming. Before entering my freshman year I had switched my major to finance.
4 years later I entered an MBA program. Once there I noticed a huge percentage of engineers and their reason for doing the MBA was always to get away from engineering.
Engineering takes a particular type of mind to enjoy it, and I don't believe 10% of the population has the combination of aptitude and passion for the career.
That is why great engineers are rare and very valuable. As someone that tried programming, I fully respect and oftentimes envy those that enjoy it.
Here's the link to the NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-scien...
And here's the HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3196377
I read this as a "If you liked that article you might want to check out some of this new data" sort of post.
1) http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat...
My hunch is that students drop majors because the initial appeal doesn't match up with the actual path. Numbers weren't given for math majors who drop math, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were lower than for engineering: perhaps math majors know what they're getting into.
To my 10th grade mind, engineering was where students bolted together wacky gizmos to suit their own desires, rather than study consistent strategies to minimize cost, maximize performance, etc. I'm sympathetic to the idea that engineering could have a glamerous outward appearance (despite Dilbert) that doesn't match up to what it's actually like. And math is hard.
This phenomenon was observed during the DotCom boom with engineering classes surging with wannabe millionaires who found out how hard this stuff can be. For a couple years after that bubble burst, there was a real scare that the drought of incoming comp-sci freshmen would stagnate the industry.
In a way, I wouldn't be surprised if this was happening again as we are entering into another tech boom.
Math is what separates engineers from mechanics. You can put together a tractor that works without knowing math, but not an airplane or a rocket. Nor will your tractor be anywhere near as good as it could be.
The first year of engineering at Texas A&M is mostly just stuff that you "need" to know, i.e. excel for Euler's formula. I got pretty bored and did poorly in the class. I was doing research at the time with a really prominent chemical engineer doing neat stuff. Asking around in the lab after a month of tedious lab work, everybody was just like this is basically the day to day life of chemical engineers. I talked to my dad's friend who was a chemical engineer and he said the above. I switched to math the next semester and haven't looked back since. Just my view on why I switched over.
I guess I left because I didn't find the work interesting. All of these pipes and valves and pressures and volumes didn't really hold my focus very much. I tried computer science as well, but although I liked it enough, I didn't love it enough to continue (Probably heresy to the HN crowd).
Even though I don't have a degree in engineering I'm very glad that I took the math and physics courses that I did. I can have meaningful conversations with Software Engineers, which I enjoy. In fact I worked as a math tutor for 2 years in college to help pay the bills so it's not that I hate math.
I'm a supporter of the flipped classroom model, it makes a lot of sense and is a real solution to this exact problem.
I started Engineering (CS Degree) in Boulder, CO with a guy that came in study Electrical Engineering. He was good with circuit boards and the mechanics involved in electrical parts so EE seemed like a natural fit for him.
I went to an International Baccalaureate program in HS and studied Calculus pretty extensively in my 11th and 12th grades. My friend went to a small HS outside of Colorado Springs and never went past Algebra 2.
Engineering Calculus 101 showed me the value of my high school math curriculum. I didn't find it too difficult, as it was mostly a review for me. But it destroyed my friend completely. I remember watching his eyes glaze over as he struggled to keep up even in the early sessions. When we all got together to do the homework he was struggling to understand even the basics of Calculus.
On his first exam, he scored a 15%. At the professor's office hours, he was told nobody from his HS had passed Calc 101 in the past 5 years. He was advised to switch to B-school and that's where he ended up getting his degree.
I remember going to an upper-level math student with a problem when I was in second year and they guy had no idea what my coursework was or how to do it. They would blast you with about 2.5 years of insane math and other tools, and the last 1.5 years consisted of explaining to you how stringing those tools together allowed you to do just about anything.
This was true when I was in school, a long time ago.
Engineers could only party on the weekends, because they always had homework to do.
Architects couldn't party at all, because they were always in the lab.
Liberal arts majors were the most fun... They could always party.
Then, at least in my peer group, quite a few of them went to law school and "buckled down"... Now they charge me $250 per hour to review a stinking form contract.
He assumes the way too much about the quality and quantity of the student's future earnings if they just continue "in the workforce", whatever that means.
Or, as the old joke goes: "A lawyer or accountant with 30 years of experience is semi-retired... A software engineer with 30 years of experience is likely unemployed".
I can believe that standards have slipped since 1961, but all the productivity enhancers that have been invented since then would have caused homework hours to drop regardless.
If you're interested in what you're studying, spending extra time studying it isn't a chore. The engineering students I knew either loved what they learned or loved what they would accomplish with it - aka projects, service, careers, etc. The students who I knew that were unhappy (I was one) did not have that kind of interest, even though we did well. That's a hard feeling to overcome, if you're spending a lot of time studying with no sense of purpose or intrinsic motivation, while your peers are excited about their work. I remember interviewing and visiting engineering companies, trying to imagine myself working there. For all the talk about engineering teaching you how to "solve hard problems," most jobs were not at all the creative, inventive type I had thought.
Sometimes, students come in with the wrong understanding of a major or career type. For example, "I liked studying chemistry in high school, so let me study chemical engineering," thinking they're the same. Sometimes, students find that they were more passionate about something else, like music. I or my peers didn't transfer into a liberal arts program, following the article's train of thought. We made our own paths instead. To this day, I take a fair amount of math courses.
Instead of focusing on hard or soft subjects, schools need to focus on training good thinkers who know how to learn, reason, and implement in a wide variety of styles.
Yes, engineering is hard. It is much easier to slack through a liberal arts degree, yes. However, for me I felt that my education in computer science was too narrow. To study it I had to drop jazz band, I had to drop American lit, I had to drop film, I had to drop art, all things I was passionate about in high school (in addition to writing code).
I didn't work any less hard in my easier major. In fact I probably worked harder. A lot of my friends who also defected felt a similar sense of narrow scope in studying engineering.
While I do think a lot people drop engineering because it's hard, I think that a lot of people who are able and intelligent leave STEM fields because the fields themselves do nothing to try and encourage its students to develop outside interests. And those outside interests are important, they can be life changing.
Similarly, the liberal arts majors do NOT do enough to encourage its students to explore STEM subjects, which is just as horrible, in my opinion.
I suspect that as more people go to college with the idea of ensuring that they'll make more money later, rather than to learn or due to a passion in a given field, the percentage of people who are successful at college will decline.
Plus, it has to be noted that for people with an engineering passion and mindset (who like math, breaking a large problem into smaller components, take pride in solving technical problems, and so on), college has become a less attractive option in recent years. While I don't think people with a natural engineering passion eschewing college to work in programming or startups is shifting the numbers dramatically, it's certainly something to think about.
The article has a point, the quantity of homework assigned in technical classes is insane. People burn out. Some people put in the hours, yet pull off mediocre grades at best. Its highly discouraging and destroys peoples egos. My friends attending Top 5 engineering universities are simply broken on the inside. Doing homework for 10+ hours a day, every day, as long as you can handle it, just to earn a shitty GPA barely above 3.0. Luckily they're all stubborn enough to continue pursuing their goals.
All in all, it was a very positive experience for me, and has paid off handsomely over the years. (Not the degree, I don't give a crap about that, but what I learned. A friend summed it up succinctly with "it's not about learning facts, it's about learning how to think." Learning engineering and science rewires your brain.)
I am just surprised by the chart. It implies engineering majors only study 4 more hours per week than humanities majors. I would have thought it to be much higher.
Maybe Humanities majors would have similar earnings potential if they learned a skill.
Or possibly some people aren't necessarily wired to grok To be honest in the long run they're probably better off Meanwhile power to them. It keeps our salaries higher.Note that things like athletic events are designed to discriminate the tiniest of differences from one althlete to the next.
Salaries aren't constrained by domestic supply. If they get too high Congress will open the H1-B spigot, which IMO is a good argument for picking another career path.
Calculus
Thermodynamics
Fluid Dynamics
Heat Transfer
...
The science and engineering fields have always had weeder classes where those who are not up to it realize their error and find another major. That is not a problem.
There is almost the presumption in these articles that everyone is equal and schools should be able to take any random person off the street and form them into a competent engineer through proper training. It is a fallacy that that is possible.
Taking students, who you have already identified as competent and likely to succeed by admitting them, then trying to get rid of a huge percentage of them with an arbitrarily-difficult course, is just stupid.
The mindset of "we have to clean out the riff-raff" in engineering is why so many people drop out, not that people are unqualified, it's that irrelevant, difficult material is the first thing you encounter, and you learn it then immediately discard it when you move on to material that's even tangentially related to what you will do every day as an engineer.