9 ms·

Why College Students Leave the Engineering Track

79 points by robg 15y ago

llz 15y ago
How about the simplest answer –Students don't always know, regardless of topic, whether or not it's a good fit for them and they change majors?
michaelcampbell 15y ago
I know why I left. It was hard, and I was lazy. I wish I'd had the fortitude to stay, but I did not.
Mc_Big_G 15y ago
Answer: Calculus Thermodynamics Fluid Dynamics Heat Transfer ...
ColinWright 15y ago
Same story, same paper, different writer, and now it's "engineering" and not the more generic "science." I have to admit I'm a little surprised at the NYT running pretty much the same story just 11 weeks apart. Here's the link to the NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-science-majors-change-their-mind-its-just-so-darn-hard.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-scien... And here's the HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3196377 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3196377
- minimax 15y ago
  It's the same topic but it's a different story. The science and engineering indicators report linked in the first paragraph hadn't even been published when the first story was written. Also she provides a link to the previous NYT story you've pointed out directly in her blog post (ctrl-f "As my colleague Christopher Drew wrote in an article in November"). I read this as a "If you liked that article you might want to check out some of this new data" sort of post.
- nabilt 15y ago
  In their defence they did link to the National Science Board published a lot of information on the topic so it wasn't total link bait. http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/ http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/
keithnoizu 15y ago
Or possibly some people aren't necessarily wired to grok the concepts needed to get ahead in this industry and find that while they like the increased earning potential sitting in a desk all day long writing code isn't for them. To be honest in the long run they're probably better off with a business degree and MBA if they really want to max out on earning potential. Meanwhile power to them. It keeps our salaries higher.
- pnathan 15y ago
  There's a decent body of research that shows talent doesn't really play much of a role in learning, it's more will and the willingness to work hard.
  - WalterBright 15y ago
    I've long suspected that talent in anything amounts to about 1% of your success, and the other 99% is hard work. Note that things like athletic events are designed to discriminate the tiniest of differences from one althlete to the next.
- tsotha 15y ago
  >Meanwhile power to them. It keeps our salaries higher. Salaries aren't constrained by domestic supply. If they get too high Congress will open the H1-B spigot, which IMO is a good argument for picking another career path.
pixie_ 15y ago
Homework is the problem - it burns people out, and not just engineering students, but everyone k-12 as well. I'm a supporter of the flipped classroom model, it makes a lot of sense and is a real solution to this exact problem. http://www.knewton.com/flipped-classroom http://www.knewton.com/flipped-classroom
bane 15y ago
Because it's really hard and there tend to be absolutely right and wrong answers in the work. You can't skate through with a b.s., content free essay on the plight of the modern farmer in a consumer world, shackled by the inadequacies of an archaic nation-state governing system or a 5-paragraph essay on the plight of the Hellenic world during the rise and fall of the Roman Empire -- getting A's only because it's properly formatted and has the right number of words, arranged roughly into the right number of paragraphs. The "soft" subjects in college were easy. I could put off any assignment until the last night, then whip something up before class and guarantee an A. My engineering classes on the other hand, were so hard, so time consuming, that I spent at least 6-8 hours outside of class for every hour I spent in class. A 12 credit semester might mean 80 hours outside of class writing code, reading books, trying desperately to grok complex data structured and mind-bending math. Write it wrong, and it crashes, or the answer is wrong, and you get an F.
- cparedes 15y ago
  I think the problem isn't inherently the class content (in 'soft' subjects), but how decent the professor is in letting students get by with weak arguments in their papers. I think there's some correlation between how much they actually care about the class, and how tough the class will end up being. I took an English class in college that was probably one of my toughest classes in college (yes, about as tough as my math classes) - the professor and the TA's tore apart each paper ruthlessly, and judged them at a quality slightly below academic papers. I wrote a paper that was well formatted and had decent grammar in it, but it was summarily torn apart and was given a C on the paper, because my arguments in the paper sucked. Also, I'd say that Philosophy is also a pretty damn tough subject in the 'soft subjects' of college. You're expected to be nearly as technical as a mathematician in your arguments, except you're writing essays/articles in prose, rather than with terse explanations and symbols. Philosophy took about as much time for me to study for as my math classes.
  - jseliger 15y ago
    The only word missing in your comment is "incentives:" in academia, professors, especially in soft subjects, don't have much of an incentive to grade accurately; they have an incentive to publish "research" that leads to jobs, tenure, and promotion. If you want professors on the whole to be better and more accurate graders, you have to give them incentives to do so. Which I discuss in more detail here: http://jseliger.com/2011/04/02/grade-inflation-what-grade-inflation/ http://jseliger.com/2011/04/02/grade-inflation-what-grade-in....
jethroalias97 15y ago
From 1980 to today the population has increased by roughly 36% while college enrollment increased by roughly 68%. More people feel they need to go to college to get a job, so when they say, "in 1961, full-time students spent about 40 hours each week in class and studying. By 2003, they were investing about 27 hours a week." That shouldn't indicate as implied by the article that we are becoming lazier, merely there is a larger percentage of the population in the mix. 1) http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98 http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98 2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat...
- prophetjohn 15y ago
  I don't get your point. Are you claiming that the 1961 stats are a result of a small sample size? If not, the larger percentage of the population enrolling isn't going to change the average hours spent per week studying unless students were, on average, spending less time studying.
  - jethroalias97 15y ago
    My point is that nowadays, individuals who are disinclined to higher education, and hence are less likely to put their heart and soul into it, still feel obliged to attend. That's my analysis anyway.
WalterBright 15y ago
One word reason: math
- ISloop 15y ago
  True. One of the calculus courses at my college is a weeder class. I have met so many people who gave up on their dreams of being scientists and engineers because they couldn't handle the intensity of the course. I was among the majority that didn't pass the class. I admit I'm not the brightest math student, but I truly enjoy learning about Computer Science so I'm gonna power through those classes for as long as it takes. I'll be retaking the class again this upcoming semester. The article has a point, the quantity of homework assigned in technical classes is insane. People burn out. Some people put in the hours, yet pull off mediocre grades at best. Its highly discouraging and destroys peoples egos. My friends attending Top 5 engineering universities are simply broken on the inside. Doing homework for 10+ hours a day, every day, as long as you can handle it, just to earn a shitty GPA barely above 3.0. Luckily they're all stubborn enough to continue pursuing their goals.
  - WalterBright 15y ago
    It wasn't so bad for me. I suppose I wound up working an average of about 9 hours a day, 5 hours a week. But a lot of that time was in "troll sessions" with friends, and it was fun. I also really enjoyed being around smart and motivated people. All in all, it was a very positive experience for me, and has paid off handsomely over the years. (Not the degree, I don't give a crap about that, but what I learned. A friend summed it up succinctly with "it's not about learning facts, it's about learning how to think." Learning engineering and science rewires your brain.)
bri3d 15y ago
I think this article would have been far more useful if it had included raw numbers in addition to percentages, especially as it cites data from the past compared to today. I suspect that as more people go to college with the idea of ensuring that they'll make more money later, rather than to learn or due to a passion in a given field, the percentage of people who are successful at college will decline. Plus, it has to be noted that for people with an engineering passion and mindset (who like math, breaking a large problem into smaller components, take pride in solving technical problems, and so on), college has become a less attractive option in recent years. While I don't think people with a natural engineering passion eschewing college to work in programming or startups is shifting the numbers dramatically, it's certainly something to think about.
geogra4 15y ago
I left the engineering track after 2 years, although I still work in tech in a roundabout way. I am a GIS Analyst who also does various software testing and scripting tasks when required. We're a small shop that makes a GIS Tool for Windows. I guess I left because I didn't find the work interesting. All of these pipes and valves and pressures and volumes didn't really hold my focus very much. I tried computer science as well, but although I liked it enough, I didn't love it enough to continue (Probably heresy to the HN crowd). Even though I don't have a degree in engineering I'm very glad that I took the math and physics courses that I did. I can have meaningful conversations with Software Engineers, which I enjoy. In fact I worked as a math tutor for 2 years in college to help pay the bills so it's not that I hate math.
zachrose 15y ago
The article and comments here suggest it's because homework and math are hard and non-Engineering students don't work as hard. My hunch is that students drop majors because the initial appeal doesn't match up with the actual path. Numbers weren't given for math majors who drop math, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were lower than for engineering: perhaps math majors know what they're getting into. To my 10th grade mind, engineering was where students bolted together wacky gizmos to suit their own desires, rather than study consistent strategies to minimize cost, maximize performance, etc. I'm sympathetic to the idea that engineering could have a glamerous outward appearance (despite Dilbert) that doesn't match up to what it's actually like. And math is hard.
- JamesLeonis 15y ago
  I agree. Traditional engineering has the appeal of robots and rockets, while comp-sci has the Facebooks and Googles. Even chemistry has the mad scientist images. The closest I can think of for Math is A Beautiful Mind, which doesn't have the same glam as the above. This phenomenon was observed during the DotCom boom with engineering classes surging with wannabe millionaires who found out how hard this stuff can be. For a couple years after that bubble burst, there was a real scare that the drought of incoming comp-sci freshmen would stagnate the industry. In a way, I wouldn't be surprised if this was happening again as we are entering into another tech boom.
- WalterBright 15y ago
  Every single engineering and science class I took at Caltech was a math class. If you don't like math, you're going to switch to something else. Math is what separates engineers from mechanics. You can put together a tractor that works without knowing math, but not an airplane or a rocket. Nor will your tractor be anywhere near as good as it could be.
wtvanhest 15y ago
There is another explanation for the high attrition rate which I believe also explains why so many engineers end up in business school. People select engineering as a career for the money, not because they actually want to do it for a living. In 1995 I was starting high school and had signed up for computer programming classes and was teaching myself along with my friends. In 1999 I fell in love with finance and realized I hated programming. Before entering my freshman year I had switched my major to finance. 4 years later I entered an MBA program. Once there I noticed a huge percentage of engineers and their reason for doing the MBA was always to get away from engineering. Engineering takes a particular type of mind to enjoy it, and I don't believe 10% of the population has the combination of aptitude and passion for the career. That is why great engineers are rare and very valuable. As someone that tried programming, I fully respect and oftentimes envy those that enjoy it.
caublestone 15y ago
That would imply that humanities majors could have similar earnings potential if only they studied more, which may or may not be true. Maybe Humanities majors would have similar earnings potential if they learned a skill.
mnemonicsloth 15y ago
Think about how much longer a college course would take if you didn't have: electronic calculators, word processors, 24-hour communications (email), Wikipedia. I can believe that standards have slipped since 1961, but all the productivity enhancers that have been invented since then would have caused homework hours to drop regardless.
lrobb 15y ago
Apparently I'm one of the few that actually read the article... The workload is cited as one of the main reasons. This was true when I was in school, a long time ago. Engineers could only party on the weekends, because they always had homework to do. Architects couldn't party at all, because they were always in the lab. Liberal arts majors were the most fun... They could always party. Then, at least in my peer group, quite a few of them went to law school and "buckled down"... Now they charge me $250 per hour to review a stinking form contract.
- EiZei 15y ago
  Becoming a lawyer in the US is probably the least profitable thing you can do: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1497044## http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1497044##
  - lrobb 15y ago
    Those things are always off the mark... He assumes the way too much about the quality and quantity of the student's future earnings if they just continue "in the workforce", whatever that means. Or, as the old joke goes: "A lawyer or accountant with 30 years of experience is semi-retired... A software engineer with 30 years of experience is likely unemployed".
zackzackzack 15y ago
"You can do math? Fuck chemical engineering. Do math." -Dad's friend when I told him that I was having doubts about chemical engineering. The first year of engineering at Texas A&M is mostly just stuff that you "need" to know, i.e. excel for Euler's formula. I got pretty bored and did poorly in the class. I was doing research at the time with a really prominent chemical engineer doing neat stuff. Asking around in the lab after a month of tedious lab work, everybody was just like this is basically the day to day life of chemical engineers. I talked to my dad's friend who was a chemical engineer and he said the above. I switched to math the next semester and haven't looked back since. Just my view on why I switched over.
droithomme 15y ago
Engineering is hard and you better understand calculus and be smart and an analytical and creative thinker, things that are not present together in everyone. That is fine. Not everyone has the same strengths. I am not a great basketball player and never will play in the NBA. I am a good swimmer but even so I will never compete in the olympics. The science and engineering fields have always had weeder classes where those who are not up to it realize their error and find another major. That is not a problem. There is almost the presumption in these articles that everyone is equal and schools should be able to take any random person off the street and form them into a competent engineer through proper training. It is a fallacy that that is possible.
- tdfx 15y ago
  I've taken the weeder classes at decent colleges and I have to say that "not up to it" simply means undisciplined. While my experience isn't all-encompassing, I personally haven't seen any undergraduate class that couldn't be passed by almost any of the students with a sustained effort. Some students are more naturally inclined for the hard sciences than others. It doesn't mean they can't do it. It just means they have to work harder at it. Most just choose not to.
- gergles 15y ago
  The idea that there need to exist "weeder classes" is utterly stupid. The admissions process is the "weeder" process. If you can't hack it, you shouldn't be admitted at all. Taking students, who you have already identified as competent and likely to succeed by admitting them, then trying to get rid of a huge percentage of them with an arbitrarily-difficult course, is just stupid. The mindset of "we have to clean out the riff-raff" in engineering is why so many people drop out, not that people are unqualified, it's that irrelevant, difficult material is the first thing you encounter, and you learn it then immediately discard it when you move on to material that's even tangentially related to what you will do every day as an engineer.
minsight 15y ago
People left Engineering when I was studying it because they got into it for the wrong reason. They took it because they thought it was good money and/or because they were told that they were well-suited for it. Unfortunately, the workload is such that, unless you really, really wanted to do it, it wasn't worth the hassle. (At the time, I worked in the lab with people taking Computer Science who had about 24 hours per week of lectures, tutorials and labs (before homework), while we had between 37-40) I remember going to an upper-level math student with a problem when I was in second year and they guy had no idea what my coursework was or how to do it. They would blast you with about 2.5 years of insane math and other tools, and the last 1.5 years consisted of explaining to you how stringing those tools together allowed you to do just about anything.
mathattack 15y ago
As others have said, engineering is hard. It's also why managers in other fields like to hire engineers. I am just surprised by the chart. It implies engineering majors only study 4 more hours per week than humanities majors. I would have thought it to be much higher.
hkarthik 15y ago
As others have stated, it's mostly issues with the Math and the lack of preparation that most US public high schoolers get in Calculus. I started Engineering (CS Degree) in Boulder, CO with a guy that came in study Electrical Engineering. He was good with circuit boards and the mechanics involved in electrical parts so EE seemed like a natural fit for him. I went to an International Baccalaureate program in HS and studied Calculus pretty extensively in my 11th and 12th grades. My friend went to a small HS outside of Colorado Springs and never went past Algebra 2. Engineering Calculus 101 showed me the value of my high school math curriculum. I didn't find it too difficult, as it was mostly a review for me. But it destroyed my friend completely. I remember watching his eyes glaze over as he struggled to keep up even in the early sessions. When we all got together to do the homework he was struggling to understand even the basics of Calculus. On his first exam, he scored a 15%. At the professor's office hours, he was told nobody from his HS had passed Calc 101 in the past 5 years. He was advised to switch to B-school and that's where he ended up getting his degree.
candre717 15y ago
The difficulty in studying engineering is overrated. This article is describing a correlation, not a causation. If you're interested in what you're studying, spending extra time studying it isn't a chore. The engineering students I knew either loved what they learned or loved what they would accomplish with it - aka projects, service, careers, etc. The students who I knew that were unhappy (I was one) did not have that kind of interest, even though we did well. That's a hard feeling to overcome, if you're spending a lot of time studying with no sense of purpose or intrinsic motivation, while your peers are excited about their work. I remember interviewing and visiting engineering companies, trying to imagine myself working there. For all the talk about engineering teaching you how to "solve hard problems," most jobs were not at all the creative, inventive type I had thought. Sometimes, students come in with the wrong understanding of a major or career type. For example, "I liked studying chemistry in high school, so let me study chemical engineering," thinking they're the same. Sometimes, students find that they were more passionate about something else, like music. I or my peers didn't transfer into a liberal arts program, following the article's train of thought. We made our own paths instead. To this day, I take a fair amount of math courses. Instead of focusing on hard or soft subjects, schools need to focus on training good thinkers who know how to learn, reason, and implement in a wide variety of styles.
kenamarit 15y ago
I myself am one of the statistics mentioned in the article. I studied comp sci for two years then switched to a BFA. Still, it's so much easier to find work as a programmer so that's what I do. Yes, engineering is hard. It is much easier to slack through a liberal arts degree, yes. However, for me I felt that my education in computer science was too narrow. To study it I had to drop jazz band, I had to drop American lit, I had to drop film, I had to drop art, all things I was passionate about in high school (in addition to writing code). I didn't work any less hard in my easier major. In fact I probably worked harder. A lot of my friends who also defected felt a similar sense of narrow scope in studying engineering. While I do think a lot people drop engineering because it's hard, I think that a lot of people who are able and intelligent leave STEM fields because the fields themselves do nothing to try and encourage its students to develop outside interests. And those outside interests are important, they can be life changing. Similarly, the liberal arts majors do NOT do enough to encourage its students to explore STEM subjects, which is just as horrible, in my opinion.

79 points by robg 15y ago

llz 15y ago

How about the simplest answer –Students don't always know, regardless of topic, whether or not it's a good fit for them and they change majors?

michaelcampbell 15y ago

I know why I left. It was hard, and I was lazy. I wish I'd had the fortitude to stay, but I did not.

Mc_Big_G 15y ago

Answer: Calculus Thermodynamics Fluid Dynamics Heat Transfer ...

ColinWright 15y ago

Same story, same paper, different writer, and now it's "engineering" and not the more generic "science." I have to admit I'm a little surprised at the NYT running pretty much the same story just 11 weeks apart. Here's the link to the NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-science-majors-change-their-mind-its-just-so-darn-hard.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/why-scien... And here's the HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3196377 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3196377

minimax 15y ago
It's the same topic but it's a different story. The science and engineering indicators report linked in the first paragraph hadn't even been published when the first story was written. Also she provides a link to the previous NYT story you've pointed out directly in her blog post (ctrl-f "As my colleague Christopher Drew wrote in an article in November"). I read this as a "If you liked that article you might want to check out some of this new data" sort of post.
nabilt 15y ago
In their defence they did link to the National Science Board published a lot of information on the topic so it wasn't total link bait. http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/ http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/

keithnoizu 15y ago

Or possibly some people aren't necessarily wired to grok the concepts needed to get ahead in this industry and find that while they like the increased earning potential sitting in a desk all day long writing code isn't for them. To be honest in the long run they're probably better off with a business degree and MBA if they really want to max out on earning potential. Meanwhile power to them. It keeps our salaries higher.

pnathan 15y ago
There's a decent body of research that shows talent doesn't really play much of a role in learning, it's more will and the willingness to work hard.
- WalterBright 15y ago
  I've long suspected that talent in anything amounts to about 1% of your success, and the other 99% is hard work. Note that things like athletic events are designed to discriminate the tiniest of differences from one althlete to the next.
tsotha 15y ago
>Meanwhile power to them. It keeps our salaries higher. Salaries aren't constrained by domestic supply. If they get too high Congress will open the H1-B spigot, which IMO is a good argument for picking another career path.

pixie_ 15y ago

Homework is the problem - it burns people out, and not just engineering students, but everyone k-12 as well. I'm a supporter of the flipped classroom model, it makes a lot of sense and is a real solution to this exact problem. http://www.knewton.com/flipped-classroom http://www.knewton.com/flipped-classroom

bane 15y ago

Because it's really hard and there tend to be absolutely right and wrong answers in the work. You can't skate through with a b.s., content free essay on the plight of the modern farmer in a consumer world, shackled by the inadequacies of an archaic nation-state governing system or a 5-paragraph essay on the plight of the Hellenic world during the rise and fall of the Roman Empire -- getting A's only because it's properly formatted and has the right number of words, arranged roughly into the right number of paragraphs. The "soft" subjects in college were easy. I could put off any assignment until the last night, then whip something up before class and guarantee an A. My engineering classes on the other hand, were so hard, so time consuming, that I spent at least 6-8 hours outside of class for every hour I spent in class. A 12 credit semester might mean 80 hours outside of class writing code, reading books, trying desperately to grok complex data structured and mind-bending math. Write it wrong, and it crashes, or the answer is wrong, and you get an F.

cparedes 15y ago
I think the problem isn't inherently the class content (in 'soft' subjects), but how decent the professor is in letting students get by with weak arguments in their papers. I think there's some correlation between how much they actually care about the class, and how tough the class will end up being. I took an English class in college that was probably one of my toughest classes in college (yes, about as tough as my math classes) - the professor and the TA's tore apart each paper ruthlessly, and judged them at a quality slightly below academic papers. I wrote a paper that was well formatted and had decent grammar in it, but it was summarily torn apart and was given a C on the paper, because my arguments in the paper sucked. Also, I'd say that Philosophy is also a pretty damn tough subject in the 'soft subjects' of college. You're expected to be nearly as technical as a mathematician in your arguments, except you're writing essays/articles in prose, rather than with terse explanations and symbols. Philosophy took about as much time for me to study for as my math classes.
- jseliger 15y ago
  The only word missing in your comment is "incentives:" in academia, professors, especially in soft subjects, don't have much of an incentive to grade accurately; they have an incentive to publish "research" that leads to jobs, tenure, and promotion. If you want professors on the whole to be better and more accurate graders, you have to give them incentives to do so. Which I discuss in more detail here: http://jseliger.com/2011/04/02/grade-inflation-what-grade-inflation/ http://jseliger.com/2011/04/02/grade-inflation-what-grade-in....

jethroalias97 15y ago

From 1980 to today the population has increased by roughly 36% while college enrollment increased by roughly 68%. More people feel they need to go to college to get a job, so when they say, "in 1961, full-time students spent about 40 hours each week in class and studying. By 2003, they were investing about 27 hours a week." That shouldn't indicate as implied by the article that we are becoming lazier, merely there is a larger percentage of the population in the mix. 1) http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98 http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98 2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Stat...

prophetjohn 15y ago
I don't get your point. Are you claiming that the 1961 stats are a result of a small sample size? If not, the larger percentage of the population enrolling isn't going to change the average hours spent per week studying unless students were, on average, spending less time studying.
- jethroalias97 15y ago
  My point is that nowadays, individuals who are disinclined to higher education, and hence are less likely to put their heart and soul into it, still feel obliged to attend. That's my analysis anyway.

WalterBright 15y ago

One word reason: math

ISloop 15y ago
True. One of the calculus courses at my college is a weeder class. I have met so many people who gave up on their dreams of being scientists and engineers because they couldn't handle the intensity of the course. I was among the majority that didn't pass the class. I admit I'm not the brightest math student, but I truly enjoy learning about Computer Science so I'm gonna power through those classes for as long as it takes. I'll be retaking the class again this upcoming semester. The article has a point, the quantity of homework assigned in technical classes is insane. People burn out. Some people put in the hours, yet pull off mediocre grades at best. Its highly discouraging and destroys peoples egos. My friends attending Top 5 engineering universities are simply broken on the inside. Doing homework for 10+ hours a day, every day, as long as you can handle it, just to earn a shitty GPA barely above 3.0. Luckily they're all stubborn enough to continue pursuing their goals.
- WalterBright 15y ago
  It wasn't so bad for me. I suppose I wound up working an average of about 9 hours a day, 5 hours a week. But a lot of that time was in "troll sessions" with friends, and it was fun. I also really enjoyed being around smart and motivated people. All in all, it was a very positive experience for me, and has paid off handsomely over the years. (Not the degree, I don't give a crap about that, but what I learned. A friend summed it up succinctly with "it's not about learning facts, it's about learning how to think." Learning engineering and science rewires your brain.)

bri3d 15y ago

I think this article would have been far more useful if it had included raw numbers in addition to percentages, especially as it cites data from the past compared to today. I suspect that as more people go to college with the idea of ensuring that they'll make more money later, rather than to learn or due to a passion in a given field, the percentage of people who are successful at college will decline. Plus, it has to be noted that for people with an engineering passion and mindset (who like math, breaking a large problem into smaller components, take pride in solving technical problems, and so on), college has become a less attractive option in recent years. While I don't think people with a natural engineering passion eschewing college to work in programming or startups is shifting the numbers dramatically, it's certainly something to think about.

geogra4 15y ago

I left the engineering track after 2 years, although I still work in tech in a roundabout way. I am a GIS Analyst who also does various software testing and scripting tasks when required. We're a small shop that makes a GIS Tool for Windows. I guess I left because I didn't find the work interesting. All of these pipes and valves and pressures and volumes didn't really hold my focus very much. I tried computer science as well, but although I liked it enough, I didn't love it enough to continue (Probably heresy to the HN crowd). Even though I don't have a degree in engineering I'm very glad that I took the math and physics courses that I did. I can have meaningful conversations with Software Engineers, which I enjoy. In fact I worked as a math tutor for 2 years in college to help pay the bills so it's not that I hate math.

zachrose 15y ago

The article and comments here suggest it's because homework and math are hard and non-Engineering students don't work as hard. My hunch is that students drop majors because the initial appeal doesn't match up with the actual path. Numbers weren't given for math majors who drop math, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were lower than for engineering: perhaps math majors know what they're getting into. To my 10th grade mind, engineering was where students bolted together wacky gizmos to suit their own desires, rather than study consistent strategies to minimize cost, maximize performance, etc. I'm sympathetic to the idea that engineering could have a glamerous outward appearance (despite Dilbert) that doesn't match up to what it's actually like. And math is hard.

JamesLeonis 15y ago
I agree. Traditional engineering has the appeal of robots and rockets, while comp-sci has the Facebooks and Googles. Even chemistry has the mad scientist images. The closest I can think of for Math is A Beautiful Mind, which doesn't have the same glam as the above. This phenomenon was observed during the DotCom boom with engineering classes surging with wannabe millionaires who found out how hard this stuff can be. For a couple years after that bubble burst, there was a real scare that the drought of incoming comp-sci freshmen would stagnate the industry. In a way, I wouldn't be surprised if this was happening again as we are entering into another tech boom.
WalterBright 15y ago
Every single engineering and science class I took at Caltech was a math class. If you don't like math, you're going to switch to something else. Math is what separates engineers from mechanics. You can put together a tractor that works without knowing math, but not an airplane or a rocket. Nor will your tractor be anywhere near as good as it could be.

wtvanhest 15y ago

There is another explanation for the high attrition rate which I believe also explains why so many engineers end up in business school. People select engineering as a career for the money, not because they actually want to do it for a living. In 1995 I was starting high school and had signed up for computer programming classes and was teaching myself along with my friends. In 1999 I fell in love with finance and realized I hated programming. Before entering my freshman year I had switched my major to finance. 4 years later I entered an MBA program. Once there I noticed a huge percentage of engineers and their reason for doing the MBA was always to get away from engineering. Engineering takes a particular type of mind to enjoy it, and I don't believe 10% of the population has the combination of aptitude and passion for the career. That is why great engineers are rare and very valuable. As someone that tried programming, I fully respect and oftentimes envy those that enjoy it.

caublestone 15y ago

That would imply that humanities majors could have similar earnings potential if only they studied more, which may or may not be true. Maybe Humanities majors would have similar earnings potential if they learned a skill.

mnemonicsloth 15y ago

Think about how much longer a college course would take if you didn't have: electronic calculators, word processors, 24-hour communications (email), Wikipedia. I can believe that standards have slipped since 1961, but all the productivity enhancers that have been invented since then would have caused homework hours to drop regardless.

lrobb 15y ago

Apparently I'm one of the few that actually read the article... The workload is cited as one of the main reasons. This was true when I was in school, a long time ago. Engineers could only party on the weekends, because they always had homework to do. Architects couldn't party at all, because they were always in the lab. Liberal arts majors were the most fun... They could always party. Then, at least in my peer group, quite a few of them went to law school and "buckled down"... Now they charge me $250 per hour to review a stinking form contract.

EiZei 15y ago
Becoming a lawyer in the US is probably the least profitable thing you can do: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1497044## http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1497044##
- lrobb 15y ago
  Those things are always off the mark... He assumes the way too much about the quality and quantity of the student's future earnings if they just continue "in the workforce", whatever that means. Or, as the old joke goes: "A lawyer or accountant with 30 years of experience is semi-retired... A software engineer with 30 years of experience is likely unemployed".

zackzackzack 15y ago

"You can do math? Fuck chemical engineering. Do math." -Dad's friend when I told him that I was having doubts about chemical engineering. The first year of engineering at Texas A&M is mostly just stuff that you "need" to know, i.e. excel for Euler's formula. I got pretty bored and did poorly in the class. I was doing research at the time with a really prominent chemical engineer doing neat stuff. Asking around in the lab after a month of tedious lab work, everybody was just like this is basically the day to day life of chemical engineers. I talked to my dad's friend who was a chemical engineer and he said the above. I switched to math the next semester and haven't looked back since. Just my view on why I switched over.

droithomme 15y ago

Engineering is hard and you better understand calculus and be smart and an analytical and creative thinker, things that are not present together in everyone. That is fine. Not everyone has the same strengths. I am not a great basketball player and never will play in the NBA. I am a good swimmer but even so I will never compete in the olympics. The science and engineering fields have always had weeder classes where those who are not up to it realize their error and find another major. That is not a problem. There is almost the presumption in these articles that everyone is equal and schools should be able to take any random person off the street and form them into a competent engineer through proper training. It is a fallacy that that is possible.

tdfx 15y ago
I've taken the weeder classes at decent colleges and I have to say that "not up to it" simply means undisciplined. While my experience isn't all-encompassing, I personally haven't seen any undergraduate class that couldn't be passed by almost any of the students with a sustained effort. Some students are more naturally inclined for the hard sciences than others. It doesn't mean they can't do it. It just means they have to work harder at it. Most just choose not to.
gergles 15y ago
The idea that there need to exist "weeder classes" is utterly stupid. The admissions process is the "weeder" process. If you can't hack it, you shouldn't be admitted at all. Taking students, who you have already identified as competent and likely to succeed by admitting them, then trying to get rid of a huge percentage of them with an arbitrarily-difficult course, is just stupid. The mindset of "we have to clean out the riff-raff" in engineering is why so many people drop out, not that people are unqualified, it's that irrelevant, difficult material is the first thing you encounter, and you learn it then immediately discard it when you move on to material that's even tangentially related to what you will do every day as an engineer.

minsight 15y ago

People left Engineering when I was studying it because they got into it for the wrong reason. They took it because they thought it was good money and/or because they were told that they were well-suited for it. Unfortunately, the workload is such that, unless you really, really wanted to do it, it wasn't worth the hassle. (At the time, I worked in the lab with people taking Computer Science who had about 24 hours per week of lectures, tutorials and labs (before homework), while we had between 37-40) I remember going to an upper-level math student with a problem when I was in second year and they guy had no idea what my coursework was or how to do it. They would blast you with about 2.5 years of insane math and other tools, and the last 1.5 years consisted of explaining to you how stringing those tools together allowed you to do just about anything.

mathattack 15y ago

As others have said, engineering is hard. It's also why managers in other fields like to hire engineers. I am just surprised by the chart. It implies engineering majors only study 4 more hours per week than humanities majors. I would have thought it to be much higher.

hkarthik 15y ago

As others have stated, it's mostly issues with the Math and the lack of preparation that most US public high schoolers get in Calculus. I started Engineering (CS Degree) in Boulder, CO with a guy that came in study Electrical Engineering. He was good with circuit boards and the mechanics involved in electrical parts so EE seemed like a natural fit for him. I went to an International Baccalaureate program in HS and studied Calculus pretty extensively in my 11th and 12th grades. My friend went to a small HS outside of Colorado Springs and never went past Algebra 2. Engineering Calculus 101 showed me the value of my high school math curriculum. I didn't find it too difficult, as it was mostly a review for me. But it destroyed my friend completely. I remember watching his eyes glaze over as he struggled to keep up even in the early sessions. When we all got together to do the homework he was struggling to understand even the basics of Calculus. On his first exam, he scored a 15%. At the professor's office hours, he was told nobody from his HS had passed Calc 101 in the past 5 years. He was advised to switch to B-school and that's where he ended up getting his degree.

candre717 15y ago

The difficulty in studying engineering is overrated. This article is describing a correlation, not a causation. If you're interested in what you're studying, spending extra time studying it isn't a chore. The engineering students I knew either loved what they learned or loved what they would accomplish with it - aka projects, service, careers, etc. The students who I knew that were unhappy (I was one) did not have that kind of interest, even though we did well. That's a hard feeling to overcome, if you're spending a lot of time studying with no sense of purpose or intrinsic motivation, while your peers are excited about their work. I remember interviewing and visiting engineering companies, trying to imagine myself working there. For all the talk about engineering teaching you how to "solve hard problems," most jobs were not at all the creative, inventive type I had thought. Sometimes, students come in with the wrong understanding of a major or career type. For example, "I liked studying chemistry in high school, so let me study chemical engineering," thinking they're the same. Sometimes, students find that they were more passionate about something else, like music. I or my peers didn't transfer into a liberal arts program, following the article's train of thought. We made our own paths instead. To this day, I take a fair amount of math courses. Instead of focusing on hard or soft subjects, schools need to focus on training good thinkers who know how to learn, reason, and implement in a wide variety of styles.

kenamarit 15y ago

I myself am one of the statistics mentioned in the article. I studied comp sci for two years then switched to a BFA. Still, it's so much easier to find work as a programmer so that's what I do. Yes, engineering is hard. It is much easier to slack through a liberal arts degree, yes. However, for me I felt that my education in computer science was too narrow. To study it I had to drop jazz band, I had to drop American lit, I had to drop film, I had to drop art, all things I was passionate about in high school (in addition to writing code). I didn't work any less hard in my easier major. In fact I probably worked harder. A lot of my friends who also defected felt a similar sense of narrow scope in studying engineering. While I do think a lot people drop engineering because it's hard, I think that a lot of people who are able and intelligent leave STEM fields because the fields themselves do nothing to try and encourage its students to develop outside interests. And those outside interests are important, they can be life changing. Similarly, the liberal arts majors do NOT do enough to encourage its students to explore STEM subjects, which is just as horrible, in my opinion.