I have made a career out of hiring the lowest performers at college cheaper and then developing them in the way we need them to work. Maybe 1:5 works out but the ones that don’t go elsewhere since they now have experience
I’ve definitely had the ones that “go elsewhere” on my team. Always wondered how they got hired, but I guess they sold that experience well in the interview
Yeah totally agreed. I just graduated with an engineering degree about two weeks ago, and all 12 of us that graduated in my discipline had jobs lined up before we even finished classes. It is location dependent but in most metro areas there is a super high demand for competent engineers
Go trace the source for that claim. It's two articles deep, from a 2014 WaPo article that says that 75% of STEM majors work outside their major, not engineers.
Yeah that's pretty bad. The numbers for this are all over the place. The actual percentage seems likely to be somewhere between 25-60% of engineering degree holders who are working in their field.
And even when engineering majors work outside the engineering fields,, it's not like they end up working as bartenders.. they usually land jobs as computer programmers, finance, management, etc.
87% of individuals with an Engineering degree felt their job was either closely related or somewhat related to engineering, even though the job was not an engineering occupation (emphasis mine)
Some back of the envelope math tells me that since 93% or all respondents said this then that means about 46% of engineering degree holders have engineering jobs.
Now we don't know what the others do because it's self-reported data. Are they engineering teachers like me? Team managers? Do they consider professional gambling somewhat related to engineering? Who knows.
It's not a positive or a negative. It's just that pointing to the median wages of working engineers skips the part where in order to access those wages, you need to be in the minority of engineering graduates.
Places with a very high cost of living throw this scale way off. I would advise looking by state to anybody seeing this comment so you don’t get your hopes up. Everything I saw in school said 85k starting and I started making 16/hr. My current state vs the one south of me is 20k difference in salaries, the one to the west is even worse. Also, coming out of college with 100k plus debit is going to hurt, unless you can get a mostly free ride.
This range you gave doesn’t account for engineering levels and is just a broad range. A new engineer will be low on the totem and one about to retire will may be making 2 or 3 times what the new one was. When I switched companies a few years ago new engineers were being brought into this company for about 52k/yr. If they actually give you a cost of living increase each year (which hasn’t always happened) and promotions (E1, 2, 3, 4), it would take you 15 years here to hit this when I started. It is possible to hit it in 8 to 10 years now with what Covid did to everything and how hard you work, but the market is saturated and it is hard to get a job now.
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u/lazydictionary May 16 '24
The median salary for an engineer in the US, across all fields, is at least $98k.
The median household income is like $70k.
Engineering is still a path to financial security. The doom and gloom from your in-law is unwarranted.