Study: No Shortage of U.S. Engineers
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
It maybe true that they are very high paying jobs but I doubt they are as high paying as say a job on Wall Street.
As for financial sector, so much money is floating around these guys that they can earn exorbitant wages almost effortlessly without having any skill at all.
I guess people claiming they can predict future always earn disproportional amounts of wealth without doing anything useful. That is as long as everything goes well.
Squeeze this free-riding and casino mixture that is called financial market a bit and you will have plenty of smart people available for hacking physics as they loose incentives for hacking money game instead.
Fail.
I've been through the interview process at a couple of such places, and you don't get in without having some skill.
In fact, I'd say the typical financial job is more technical than the typical engineering job. A large number of engineering jobs consist of little more than the electrical/mechanical/chemical equivalent of CRUD programming, but not very many finance jobs fall into that category [1].
[1] The financial industry requires many CRUD-type jobs to be done just like any other industry, but those are usually outsourced.
Also I didn't mean CRUD jobs because they are probably same as everywhere else. Smart person with a bit of social aptitude can pass them fairly fast.
I don't think that during work you would be using skills that you were tested for during interviews. Any highly profitable branch that does not require skill has to have high barrier on entry. Because if not, soon all people would d it, and that would make it less profitable.
If job actually requires skill then barrier of entry need not to be so high because lack of skill will quickly become apparent anyway. For example barrier of entry to my college was fairly low (it was technical and not many people actually wanted to get in because math is hard so the college set their barriers fairly low to not put people off, this also probably had to do with the way the school was financed). Semester later one third of the students were gone. After first semester only half remained.
They also do it at a speed and level of distraction that many good techies can't handle. By this I mean a trader has the absolute right to yell at you at any time and make you drop everything debug the program he is using.
As for "barriers of entry need not be so high", college is different than a job. Your college still collected tuition from the students up until they dropped out. Goldman Sachs has to pay the bad techies they recruit until they fire them (and this may also be legally problematic [2]).
[1] It's usually not as deep as, e.g., a PhD in math or theoretical physics.
[2] If they did as you suggest, and women or minorities disproportionately couldn't handle the job, they are inviting a disparate impact lawsuit.
That said, I met a lot of folks who work in finance who make a lot of money and absolutely do not have a strong math background.
Of all the folks who make substantial salaries (let's say above $250K/year) on wall street, what percentage do you think could, on the spot (or within a few minutes of consulting a book or web site), solve a simple differential equation, the kind that you encounter in an upper division undergraduate math class?
(These are the two groups of people we were originally discussing.)
Later I had a pleasure to work for econometrics professor and his PhD employee. Even they didn't understand all the math they were using.
How about some supporting evidence?
I suppose that it is okay if you don't, but is it really too much trouble to acknowledge that up front?
Of course, part of that "overall compensation" does include things which are hard to directly measure such as enjoyment of the job, flexible scheduling, and prestige in addition to traditional ideas of money and benefits.
It has to be better than the next best alternative. (Opportunity costs.)
Heads of other professional organizations also criticized the study for its lack of specificity among industries. The argument is that some STEM students and graduates may be worth cultivating more than others. The report's authors said it would have been too difficult and costly to perform a longitudinal data analysis by individual industry.
There's your problem. Anecdotal evidence here: they're all medicine. Everyone under the frickin sun wants to be a doctor.
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/health_science/daily/20091028...
"In the last decade, U.S. colleges graduated three times more scientists and engineers than the number of jobs available, the researchers said. The data went through 2005 and did not reflect the recession."
It sounds like this research was "Hey department of education how many science or engineering graduates are there in the US every year?" and "Hey bls.gov how many openings are there that match engineer or scientist for entry level positions each year?" Now divide and we are done. Conclusion, there are way to many people with science and engineering degrees.
This is drawing conclusions about the labor market with a data set that includes a wide range of degrees many of which are only prerequisites for graduate degrees in other fields.
This is much much less of a problem in say Germany where Engineer is a respected, prestigious title in its own right.
However, my grandfather is quite happy being a Diplom-Ingenieur of mathematics.
Hospital management doesn't seem to have too much trouble with it...
If someone is capable of getting into a (top or even middle tier) MS or PhD program in engineering, it means they are 1) capable of working extremely hard in an academic environment with highly rigorous subject matter, and 2) able to score high on standardized tests. This is the same skill set required for law or med school.
So how are the grads of the top engineering MS/PhD programs doing compared to law or medicine? Unless it's competitive, we can end the analysis right there (and a recent RAND study concluded that this lack of competitiveness with other options was, in fact, driving the low interest level of Americans in engineering).
By the way, I actually do think there are some good reasons to pursue an engineering or science path. Your opportunity to contribute to the general welfare is immense in engineering. You may be intensely satisfied with the work, or craftsmanship involved. You may find yourself at home in the immensely logical world, and there are actually many opportunities to work with people and improve their lives, in spite of the "loner" image engineers often have.
But this is the discussion we need to have, one based on an honest assessment of the rewards of engineering relative to other paths available to people with high levels of talent and academic ability.
Seriously speaking, however, money is a pretty major problem. It is hard not to feel unfairly treated when the lawyers working on translating your product into patentese make 5-6x per hour that you do. Of course, I have equity. I don't know how I'd feel were I an engineer, paid market rate, without it.
Why is the market rate for engineers so low, compared with other professionals? Do they need a union? Negotiations class? What is it?
http://www.urban.org/publications/411562.html
I've not verified or looked into the issue beyond requesting the ucdavis document.
That really shows who brings beacon to MS. :-)