[quote=deadzone]On the one hand, we have all these threads about how hard it is for kids with excellent grades to even get accepted to public schools in California (in any degree let along Engineering). Then on the other hand we have these H1B proponents that claim there are not enough US citizens with STEM degrees.
It just doesn’t add up unless you are suggesting that the reason it is so hard to get accepted by UC schools is due to foreign competition. Perhaps that is true for UC schools(although I highly doubt it), this is definitely not the case nationally.
According to this report, 83,000 Bachelors degrees were awarded in Engineering with 93% of those to US permanent residents (i.e. not H1B material). For masters degrees, 47,000 were awarded with 57% of those to permanent residents. For PhDs, 9500 with 46% going to permanent residents.
So not surprisingly, there is more foreign influence in the graduate programs compared to undergrad. However, overall looking at these statistics, how can you see a shortage of domestic engineers?[/quote]
Well, there could be many factors….I’ll just use myself as an example. Out of my graduating class back in the mid 90ies when we were just coming out of a recession,
1) some chose to be civil, mechanical, material science, operations research/industrial chemical engineers, who lacked the knowledge/skills then to get hired by motorola, nortel, lucent, scrappy small company qualcomm that were looking for people that had studied digital signal processing, communication systems, information theory and stochastic processes, computer networking. My Qualcomm onsite interview, I had to do a Fourier Transform problem on the whiteboard, and a “Random Walk” problem, despite neither of the two questions ended up being anywhere relevant to what they hired me to do in the system’s group.
2) some were civil,mechanical, material science, ORIE, chemical, electrical engineers, that lacked the knowledge/skills of software engineering, OOP, real time O/S, unix network programming, relational database, to get hired by Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Netscape, Spyglass, AOL, Yahoo. I was one of them that graduated from school with virtually no software knowledge and not a single software company was interested in talking to me.
3) some were civil,mechanical, material science, ORIE, chemical, electrical engineers, that lacked the knowledge/skills of hardware engineering to get hired by Intel, Sun Microsystems, AMD, HP…. I was one of them that none of the top chip companies wanted to talk to me with the exception of HP, which then gave me an interview that I totally sucked wind on (good thing I never went there)
4)There were many top engineering graduates ended up going to work for McKinsey and Company, Bain and Company, Boston Consulting Group (BCG-Qualcomm’s advisor BTW), Mercer, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan…Some as traders.
5)There were many top engineering graduates that figured they wanted to go to medical school. Not me…
6)There were many top engineering graduates that figured they wanted to stay in academia….Definitely not me…
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7)And there were plenty of graduates that barely graduated that probably would have been better off majoring in something else, because their academic performance was so bad in engineering, they couldn’t find any jobs.
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Out of all the people that applied to Qualcomm, there were only 2 of us that got in from my school with a Bachelor’s degree, and 5 of us that got in with a Master’s.
*One BS/CS got in but decided to go work for Yahoo!. He was a US citizen
*I was the single BS/EE that got into the system’s group, and I only went after getting rejected by all the wall street companies I applied for. I was a US citizen
Out of the 5 masters
*3 were MS/EE with an emphasis in communication theory/wireless systems (all H1-B)
*1 was a MS/CS with an emphasis in operating systems (US citizen)
*1 was a MS/EE with a BS/CS elsewhere with an emphasis in computer networks (H1-B)
There were some PHD hires, I think all of them were all H1-B.
I remember when people were picking engineering specialization, many of the classmates ended up deciding NOT to go the EE route, and definitely not the wireless communication route because they felt it was too much math/too much probability, too much tedious theory….And the ones that were really good at math figured out that same math applied to developing Goldman Sach’s trading platform was a lot more lucrative than going to work for a company like Motorola or Qualcomm (well, at least before we learned about stock options).
I can think of a lot of mechanical engineers that were jobless after they graduated, and I didn’t understand why they picked that major despite everything telling them getting a job was hard to find.
And if I solely counted on what I only learned in school to get me a job, I wouldn’t have been able to move around to all the other companies I’ve worked at after Qualcomm, because I didn’t learn anything in college wrto software engineering.
