Why Students Are Leaving Engineering

Ted writes "A former engineering major has written an interesting article explaining why he thinks many smart students are not studying engineering anymore." Many business leaders have commented on the lack of engineers and several companies have even started initiatives to help bolster our diminishing ranks. Will these measures be enough, or does the system require much more drastic measures?

duh

[timmarhy]

engineering is supposed to be hard and a great achievment. it's only in managment fantasy land that it's an easily replacable position.

Re:no point to be an engineer in the US

[Tablizer]

and now I'm in med school, training for a job that can't be outsourced.

Reality Check [washingtonpost.com], let alone potential visa doctor attacks. H1B's are not just for computers.

Snippets:

        Three months ago, Howard Staab learned that he suffered from a life-threatening heart condition and would have to undergo surgery at a cost of up to $200,000 -- an impossible sum for the 53-year-old carpenter from Durham, N.C., who has no health insurance.

        So he outsourced the job to India.

        Taking his cue from cost-cutting U.S. businesses, Staab last month flew about 7,500 miles to the Indian capital, where doctors at the Escorts Heart Institute & Research Centre....replaced his balky heart valve....Total bill: about $10,000, including round-trip airfare and a planned side trip to the Taj Mahal.

        "The Indian doctors, they did such a fine job here, and took care of us so well," said Staab...

        Last year, an estimated 150,000 foreigners visited India for medical procedures, and the number is increasing at the rate of about 15 percent a year, according to Zakariah Ahmed...

        Although they are equipped with state-of-the-art technology, hospitals such as Escorts typically are able to charge far less than their U.S. and European counterparts because pay scales are much lower and patient volumes higher, according to Trehan and other doctors. For example, a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan costs $60 at Escorts, compared with roughly $700 in New York, according to Trehan.

        Moreover, he added, a New York heart surgeon "has to pay $100,000 a year in malpractice insurance. Here it's $4,000."

. . . .

True, it may not eliminate the entire need for local doctors, but it could glut the market for a long time.

I'm an engineering student

[jotux]

I'm in my 4th year...and still have at least 2 to go. Did the teachers suck in the beginning? yes. Did I take classes from teachers that had seemingly intimate relationships with the chalkboard they talked to throughout class? yes. Did I quit, hell no. I stuck it out, and am still sticking it out. Turns out, once I got past the weed-out classes, and GE(still have some GE to take, *shivers*, ugh), the classes were awesome. Also turns out, some of that crappy teachers I had for weed-out classes....they are good teachers. Many of them have no patients for freshman-sophomore students because they know most of them can't hack it anyways. Once I got to upper-division, they assumed I was there for the long run and start to teach/treat me like a real person.

I've often wondered if I should have chosen a different major. But that would be taking the easy way out. So what if its hard, I'm an engineer, that's what we do.

anyways...gotta get back to writing that lab report, and not partying, not studying, and not usually getting A's.

Wimp

[tknn]

Basically he went to some grade-inflated little nursery school his whole life and then discovered that he had no skills to survive in a real school. Big shock there. The real problem is that his high-school was not tough enough. He should have properly found out that he wasn't the genius he thought he was in junior high and high school and been steered away. I guaranty those courses aren't as tough as he thought they were, it is not as if foreign engineers have it easier. They have it tougher from the beginning so they self-select.

Re:Engineers

[weston]

"You know what? Everytime I cross a bridge, ride an elevator, or fail to be crushed by a collapsing building, I'm thankful that engineering schools [pass students who apparently know less than 50% of their material]." Note this portion from the article:

I nearly fainted when I learned that I received a 43% on the Physics final. I nearly fainted again when I learned that the class average was 38%...Having allegedly mastered 43% of the course material, I was now deemed fit to take even harder Physics classes. I wondered: at the highest levels of physics, could you get a passing grade with a 5% score on a test? A 3% score?

Every one of use who's stumbled through this kind of course and walked out with a 45% average and a B+ knows that something is rotten in the state of Denmark, but we're usually so darn grateful whatever it was didn't kill our careers personally that we don't question it too closely, even if we don't know more than half the course material. (Then again, maybe it's good ol' engineering redundancy.)

Re:Engineers

[Jim_Callahan]

Um... no. Professors in my department generally design their test to have an average of about 50%, and a standard deviation in the range of 10-15%. Walking out of a class with a 45% average and a B or C just means you have a typically hardass professor, not even an exceptionally bastardly one. Getting 90% or higher on anything but a homework assignment in an engineering class means you've either found your specialty or your instructor is slacking off. It pretty much NEVER means you're recieving an exceptional education in the class, and is generally a good indicator of the opposite.

Re:Engineers

[xenocide2]

For professional engineers? Many of them already do carry insurance for malpractice.

Re:no point to be an engineer in the US

[hopethisnickisnottak]

How long, in a democratic nation like India, will it take for the residents who are skillful in their field to demand more money?

The residents who are skillful in their fields get shitloads of money here. It's not as if we're underpaid here. Just that the cost of living is much lower than in your country. Which means we can live better on less money.
e.g.
My parents make around Rs. 60000 per month => $1400. They own a reasonably large house, a smallish hospital (with an operation theatre etc. etc.), 2 cars and have enough money left over to invest.

Work ethics and study skills

[Anonymous Coward]

"What they lack is a work ethic or any study skills."

What would be nice is if these weren't just floaty abstract concepts that get tossed around in any discussion like this.

What is "a work ethic"? There are many, many work ethics. The Japanese have a Shame Culture. Their work ethics are based around the idea that if they do badly, someone else will look down on them. We have a Guilt Culture. In our culture, if we do badly we've committed a sin against the Puritan code.

These aren't good motivations for a large part of the population. In many cases it is our smarter students who get halfway through the second year of an Engineering degree and say, "You know what? School doesn't have to suck. This schedule, this pacing, these testing procedures are crueller than the difficulty of the subject warrants." Such a student has an insight into the big picture that many students who just keep their heads down lack.

I agree that there are weeding out courses, but I don't necessarily agree that the students they're weeding out ought to be. It's Ayn Rand-esque to assume that just because something is too awful for most people to bear, the people who can bear it are the best at the task. They may just be the most willing to accept pain, which is, I think, a huge part of the reason engineers and programmers are so badly mistreated.

Largely, the students who succeed at engineering or comp sci are the ones without the social skills to be involved in an external life, who are willing to throw away the kind of time and effort required to become a doctor or lawyer but don't have the cleverness for either. At any programming job I've been in, I'm competing with the people who are willing to spend four to six extra hours a day working because they just don't have anything else to do. Hourly, these people earn a very poor wage. It's a good yearly wage, which creates the illusion of good job. Just look at the EA debacle.

These personality traits do not correspond one-to-one with engineering ability. To suggest they do smacks of post-purchase rationalization. You bought your education at a higher personal cost than was really needed, and you don't want to hear that it might have been done without sacrificing your social life and emotional health.

Re:Article summary

[Anonymous Coward]

I can vouch for the afformentioned problem. Where I went to school for the most part the ta's were functionally competent, but weren't functionally teachers. I had one eastern european TA in particular that I simply couldn't understand a word from.

Re:You missed: it's going to get worse in the USA

[walterbyrd]

But, there are only so many jobs like that.

And, these day, even fewer contractors want to pay the $25K or so it takes to clear somebody.

By the way, I had a TS clearance. Didn't keep me from getting laid off, and it didn't help me get another job.

Re:It runs both ways, too

[digitalderbs]

Just FYI : Pure academic teaching jobs exist. I'm finishing my PhD in the chem dept @ Columbia University, and we have at least one full time teaching professor, and I believe other depts have them too. They receive a much heavier course load and write textbooks -- no research! Our dept has a number of adjunct professors too (part-time teachers) that don't do research in the dept -- they have industrial positions -- and teach a few courses. At least in the sciences, teaching-only positions are available.

Re:Article summary

[Kevin Stevens]

I don't really understand why people get so hung up about having TA's teach classes, particularly lower level undergrad classes. The typical professor at my college had a minimal grasp of effectively communicating even if English was his first language, and even if they did, they often had few teaching skills or an ability to identify where students were having problems. I mean with professors, I must have heard the phrase "obviously this is trivial" about 100 times over the course of my 4 years in undergrad, and there were scant few times that I agreed with them. I only had one TA teach a course that did not have a firm grasp of the material, and ironically enough that was for a course called "statistics in psychology" I took for fun that was taught by the psych department.

A case from personal experience:
I was a TA for an intro to CS class that had a 400+ person lecture and then a lab section with about 20 or so students. It was in C++, and was intended for CS majors, but also fulfilled one of the requirements for business majors. Many of the students had never done any programming, aside from some web work. Some of the students were only bascially competent using a computer. Having only recently (within 2 years) learned C++, I remembered well where I had the most trouble applying concepts. Compiler messages can be pretty daunting to a beginner (wtf is a parse error, a syntax error, symbol not found?!). I explained these to the class. When classes and oop was introduced, they understood the basic concepts but the professor only glossed over "trivial" things such as how to seperate code into .h and .cpp files and how to use the objects themselves. Several students thanked me after the class and said they would have flunked the course had I not explained to them the practical things they needed to know.

Professors are almost always very smart people, but they are rarely good teachers.

It depends on where you are

[KenSeymour]

I think if you are particularly bright, going to a school that is undergraduate focused may be short sighted.

If you can read the book, go to lectures, and figure things out for yourself, then you want to be in a research focused school. If you need lots of help with office hours and such, go to an undergraduate focused school.

The reason I say this is that I went to a reasearch focused school and was really inspired by dealing with professors who were on the cutting edge of reasearch.
Some of them were also good at explaining things and really excited about the subject.
But you couldn't count on it. Some of the big researchers had big egos and were not
helpful.
I managed to figure a lot of things out myself and was never bored.

At my alma mater (UC San Diego), we used to call it a "self-taught" University.
I was able to take classes from Scripps Institute faculty as well.
But if you need the help of professors who are good at explaining things, you might be frustrated at such a school.

I should mention that my degree is in Physics, not Computer Science. The Computer Science program in the early 80s was impacted (over full) and had lots of "weed out" courses.

YMMV.

Re:It runs both ways, too

[Anonymous Coward]

Try a four-year liberal arts college. Teaching is definitely the main focus, even for sciences, and faculty who don't want to do research don't generally have to. Of course, if you do, you also get to involve the undergrads in your work (since it's a liberal arts school, there are no grad students, lab assistants, or post-docs), which gives them real-world research experience (and co-author credit). I think generally speaking America's small liberal arts schools are a *better* destination for science study because of the closeness of teacher-student interaction fostered at an institutional level, and the expertise acquired by students thereby.

Re:Article summary

[sesshomaru]

I think you missed the money quote from the article:

"You party and blow off homework now, but in ten years, you'll be making merely wonderful money as investment bankers and consultants, while I'll be getting laid off from a great job at General Electric."

Re:Article summary

[Anonymous Coward]

I hesitantly agree, for fear of sounding socially incorrect... It is extremely difficult to work with a TA who's sole vocabulary consists of "Okay" and "Please ask to professor"...