This is your brain on engineering
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The first reason is that it's a lie. Software Engineering? Sure, it's growing. Electrical Engineering? Maybe. Mechanical Engineering? Hell no.
The second reason is that I remember when I was growing up all the hype was "Become an Accountant!! It's growing rapidly!" Now look around at everyone with an accounting degree. Whoops.
This is interesting. In South Africa Chartered Accountants are in huge demand. "Good at maths? Become an accountant" is fairly common(!). They dominate the corporate world, have a powerful lobby, earn huge salaries, and many mathy kids aspire to accounting.
I knew that South African business had an accounting fetish, but I am surprised that accounting took a knock where you are. Would you mind elaborating?
I did electrical engineering at university in the UK. All of my colleagues are either unemployed or doing something completely different. Half our tech team were engineers. They write boring business code, not mangle with fluid dynamics, jet engines or biotech as promised by the marketing for years.
We went to a public state university in New England for whatever that's worth.
What did they teach us in class that is of use today? Very little. We did all the mathematical requirements of programming (which for most are very little) at school. About as close to EE I get these days is fixing stuff and that's something anyone can do.
Do I look? - not after 15 years.
Do I long? - of course.
Do you think the second half of the 21st century will require people to know more science and math, or less?
I don't understand the Common Core well enough to really come up with policy ideas about it, but the gist of the idea is that our children here in America are not as good at Math and Science as other countries, and that we should be very alarmed by that supposed fact. The response has been to cut back on arts, music programs, physical education in order to spend more time "teaching" kids to get better grades on test about Math and Science. I had this thought, and I wonder if it's controversial.
Might it be okay that some kids in other countries are better at math and science than our kids supposedly are here? Is that the only set of skills that America is going to need in the 21st century, to the detriment of pretty much everything else? I don't think so, personally. I think it's more important that kids get a well rounded experience, even if that means lower scores on some tests that couldn't possibly be an accurate measure across global cultures.
I'm sorry, I'd have made this shorter but I didn't have the time.
Scary thing is, I don't really have any alternative advice to offer, other than "stay as flexible as possible".
Though, I took your advice. Physics is extremely flexible but not very useful on its own.
I don't have one, and I haven't looked closely, but I do have several friends who are ME grads and from what I understand it can cover a lot of control theory and machine learning stuff that winds up being applicable all over the place (there's currently a lot of demand for ME grads in finance, robotics is a possible growth area that uses a whole ton of things from ME, &c).
"Also let me know why I need to know the nuts and bolts of an ME degree to understand that far more people are getting pushed into ME than people that are actually getting jobs in ME."
Because "what the degree covers" is tremendously relevant to whether there will be growth in demand for people with that degree, which is the entire question here. I think software supply is more likely to outstrip software demand than ME supply to outstrip ME demand, though not with high confidence (the future is always uncertain).
One that I don't see mentioned elsewhere is about "By age 13, more than half of all girls are unhappy with their bodies." I'd love a source not because I doubt that it's true, but because I want to see a number for boys. 13 is the start of puberty, and most kids are clumsy and squeaky and looking longingly at the kids who are already attractive or athletic or just not so damn awkward. I take their point, but I didn't like my body at 13 and it wasn't because of gender roles. It's because my body didn't work very well.
I'm not an expert, but I actually think that there is current data to suggest that boys today are having much more trouble learning and focusing than girls. I think there might even be more girls enrolled in college than boys.
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Tempting girls into the field by dangling a carrot on a stick in the form of higher wages seems demeaning and backwards. What's more, in an age where automation is taking away more and more jobs it seems sensible to cultivate attitudes where enjoyment of work and achievement is valued more than direct personal income generation.
In any case, research shows that in countries where females are the most financially and socially free to do what they want they naturally tend towards roles related to medicine, caring and education, leaving the highly systematic jobs to men (engineering, computer science etc.). There's nothing wrong with that in and of itself, its just a difference, but we just need to make sure that anybody of any gender that exists on the spectrum of humanity is as free as possible to do what makes them happy.
But it does bring an interesting point: "at age 7, girls begin to lose confidence in math and science". I wish there was a source to that, because the way I remember it when I was a kid, math and science weren't exactly popular subjects among any of the 7-year old kids I met, but this is something I can relate to. I actually am an engineer (EE), studied a lot of hard math and use a lot of hard math in my day job. But, were it not for a complexity of factors that basically boiled down to "You can either do programming, which you like, so it's not a big deal, or you can study history and starve happy", I wouldn't have gone into this job. Were it to base my decision solely on what I did in school, before university, I'd have gone into something as far removed from mathematics and physics as possible.
For all my pre-university years I have hated mathematics with a passion. The queen of all sciences that promised to open many doors to understanding the universe largely consisted of various ways in which to (tediously) do things we have calculators for during the first eight years, and then of various ways in which to (tediously) do things that don't say anything about the universe. Physics, which supposedly had to be about explaining how the world works, was largely about how quickly trains reach cities and the greatest skill I was taught there was reasoning about why the results you get in real life are an order of magnitude away from what you get on paper. Due to my passion for astronomy, I knew there was more to Physics, but I was so utterly disgusted with Mathematics that one of the main reasons I chose EE instead of CompSci was that I wanted to make sure they don't put math in my coding. In retrospect it was actually a good decision, but for different reasons.
Enter first year EE now, where the first thing you do is these two semesters of advanced fucking calculus (background: where I live, there's a good proportion of calculus that's actually done in high school. Most Calculus I courses I've seen in American universities actually cover what is 11th and 12th grade material around here). Now, I wasn't afraid of them -- I hated mathematics, but not being stupid, I was good enough at it. But holy mother of numbers now it made sense.
Now the other thing you do along with those two semesters of calculus is two semesters of Physics. Well shit: mechanics now made sense. But it was actually a combination of factors that made it make sense.
The first one was Philosophy. For the life of me I couldn't figure out why people thought Newton was such a genius, nor why classical mechanics was considered to be so beautiful. It wasn't until put in its proper context that I understood how incredible Newton's contributions were. No one bothers to tell school kids about how people thought that the natural state of objects was rest, not motion, and that it wasn't until Newton figured out that and how to mathematically talk about changing quantities that we could understand how and why bodies move. Now it felt like Physics and Mathematics were true to their promises; prior to that, it seemed to me that they were just these boring, obnoxious tools adults built because they lacked intuition.
The other one was analytical mechanics but that's probably not as important.
Four years of EE later, I finally began to grasp what really was fascinating about math and science. They allowed me to do a lot of things: reason about the world around me and about how correct my reasoning is, provide a framework upon which to build and test inventions and help me think about why we do some of the things we do.
None of these are even remotely touched before university. Granted, they can't be done rigorously before the basics are laid out, but at least some basic treatment should be there. But no. All everyone, girls and boys learn, is how to solve for x, never even suspecting that the real challenge and beauty is in formulating problems in terms of "solve for x".
We have a 5 yo daughter and immerse her in all kinds of technical stuff (along with our 2 yo son), like building toys, 3d puzzles, math games, chess, etc. I would love for her to be a killer engineer!
But I have no interest in these pink building toys. There are so many far better gender-free toys. Knex, Superstructs, Legos, Magnatiles, Tegu blocks, etc., are just a few that are far more appealing to me as a parent.
As a society, we do seem to have a "princess problem," but I just don't see how pink building toys can solve it.
This is a good attempt at targeting parents who are rigid and scared of shaking gender norms.
They're not for you, dogg.