My comments were based on what I have seen out of most typical universities. Engineers were often given their own watered-down type of classes (some schools gi

My comments were based on what I have seen out of most typical universities. Engineers were often given their own watered-down type of classes (some schools give them different numbers, others don't) - this was also true where I went to graduate school (which is a top 5 engineering school overall, sometimes ranked #1), the pure version of the classes, even calculus, were more rigorous than the engineering versions of the same - some of the engineers were aware of this, and some of the sharper ones opted instead for the versions of the classes geared towards the respective majors. I have taught both these types of classes as a TA for math & physics, and tutored for the same & am thus better qualified to speak of the differences quite frankly. Companies that hire pure talent often have went after top math & physics types, especially Wall Street - that's no secret, and this has been true for decades. They are extremely marketable degrees, and attractive to any company when combined with domain knowledge in other fields - to give some examples of some of the things that some of my peers are doing who possess those degrees, they include public policy, programming, data science, statistics, academia, teaching, economics, patent law, and finance. The versatility is what is valuable, not necessarily the domain knowledge of math or physics itself, although that could be helpful too (i.e. the NSA, the largest employer of mathematicians, who often train them as programmers afterwards). It doesn't hurt that they are usually amongst the top degrees to have in various charts, and related careers to those skills are similarly rated very high (e.g. statistician being #2). Engineering (most notably computer science) has had a surge as of the past decade due to the talent crunch and surge in innovation in software, but at the top, many companies still are very interested in more traditional candidates who show initiative since you can teach someone many things if the person is well grounded in fundamentals, but you cannot necessarily do the reverse as easily.